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Frozen Pear Salad

A salad of frozen pears served on lettuce with mayonnaise.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Pear and lettuce share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Frozen Pear Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Freeze

  1. Pack the can of pears in a bucket with ice and coarse sea salt, covering the top of the bucket.

  2. Let it stand for 1.5 to 2 hours until frozen.

  3. Test by shaking the can.

Serve

  1. When ready to serve, cut around the center of the can with a can opener.

  2. Slice the frozen block like brick cream.

  3. Serve on lettuce with mayonnaise.

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. Pear + lettucetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together92 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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

What each ingredient does

Pears
Provide the sweet, fruity base that freezes into the salad block.
Mayonnaise
Adds fat and creaminess that contrasts with the cold, firm pears.
Lettuce
Offers a crisp, cool bed that holds the sliced pears.

The step that matters

Testing the frozen state before serving. The pears must be fully frozen through before slicing. Partly frozen fruit stays soft and will not hold clean slices, while the salt-and-ice bath lowers the temperature enough to freeze the block solid.

“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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