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Salad

Cooked or Canned Pear Salad

A salad of canned pears mixed with celery, walnuts, mayonnaise, and whipped cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Celery and walnut match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 852 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Cooked or Canned Pear Salad

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Drain the canned pears and place half on individual plates.

  2. Sprinkle the pears with chopped celery and walnut meats.

  3. Mix mayonnaise with a generous amount of whipped cream and drizzle over the salad.

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 + walnuttop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together852 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  2. Pear + walnuttop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together190 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Walnut + meattop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,035 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Pear + celerytop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together101 recipes

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

  5. Cream + celerytop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,863 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-decalactone (peach, creamy).

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

What each ingredient does

Pears
Provide the sweet, soft fruit base that the other toppings sit on.
Walnut meats
Add crunch and a toasty, nutty flavour against the soft fruit.
Whipped cream
Adds richness and a light, airy texture to the mayonnaise dressing.
Mayonnaise
Contributes fat and tang, giving the dressing body and a savoury note.

Swap the pear

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

  1. Avocadofits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Pearthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, celery, walnut, 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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