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Salad

Apple and Celery Salad

A salad of sliced apples, celery, and mayonnaise, served on lettuce leaves.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Celery and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,033 recipes. Both carry nonanal, which smells fat, citrus. The science ↓

Apple and Celery Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the apples

  1. Polish the apples.

  2. Cut a thick slice from the stem end of each.

  3. Scoop out the pulp with a potato-ball scoop.

  4. Cut the pulp into small, match-like pieces.

Make the filling

  1. Mix the apple pulp with an equal amount of chopped celery.

  2. Moisten the mixture with mayonnaise dressing.

Assemble and serve

  1. Fill the apple shells with the mixture.

  2. Replace the tops.

  3. Arrange on lettuce leaves.

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. Celery + lettucetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,033 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  2. Apple + celerytop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,155 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methoxy-4-vinylphenol (clove, smoky).

  3. Apple + lettucetop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together515 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

Apples
Provide the crisp, sweet-tart shells and the pulp that forms the body of the salad.
Celery
Adds crunch and a fresh, slightly salty contrast to the soft apple pulp.
Mayonnaise dressing
Adds fat and creaminess that moistens the mixture and binds it together.

Swap the apple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (celery, lettuce):

  1. Avocadofits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Lemonfits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against celery, lettuce. 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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