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Salad

A New Apple Salad

A salad of apples, lettuce, cream, cherries, and nuts served chilled.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

A New Apple Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Beat the double cream, lemon juice, and salt until firm.

  2. Cook the apples in a syrup made of equal parts sugar and water with cloves and cinnamon until tender, then chill.

  3. Chop the cherries and nuts finely.

Assemble and serve

  1. Wash the lettuce, remove outer leaves, and trim stalks to stand level.

  2. Place the lettuce on plates with an apple in the center of each.

  3. Mix the nuts and cherries into the cream and pour over the apples.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Clove + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Apple + cinnamontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,598 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

  3. Apple + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,774 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Sugar + syruptop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Lemon + cinnamontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Double cream
Whipped to a firm texture that forms the rich topping for the apples.
Apples
Cooked until tender in syrup, giving the salad its soft, sweet fruit base.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that balances the sweetness of the syrup and cream.
Sugar
Sweetens the syrup and helps the apples keep their shape while cooking.
Maraschino or candied cherries
Add sweetness and bright colour to the cream topping.

The step that matters

Beat the double cream until firm. Cream must be whipped only until it holds its shape; overbeating turns it grainy and can cause it to separate into butter and liquid. Chilling the cream and bowl helps it whip stably.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cream, apple, sugar, syrup, clove, cinnamon, meat):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Pearfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, apple, sugar, syrup, clove, cinnamon, meat. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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