Name: Nut Gelatine Salad
Ingredients: 1 cup broken walnut meats; 2 sweet pickles, chopped; 5 hard boiled eggs, chopped; ½ cup small pickled onions, chopped; ¼ cup vinegar; Salt and pepper to taste; 1 cup mayonnaise; Lettuce for serving

Why it works: Walnut and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 491 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Nut Gelatine Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Soak gelatine in cold water, then dissolve it in 1 cup of boiling water.
In a bowl, combine the nuts, eggs, pickles, and onions.
Add vinegar, salt, pepper, and paprika to the mixture.
Let the mixture stand until cold, then stir in the mayonnaise.
Chill in individual molds and serve on lettuce with additional 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.

Walnut + lettucetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together491 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).
Onion + lettucetop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together3,562 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Pepper + lettucetop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,037 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together68,474 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Walnut + peppertop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together3,039 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (walnut, meat, egg, vinegar, pepper, lettuce):

Mustardfits better
Capsicumfits better
Cucumberfits better
Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against walnut, meat, egg, vinegar, pepper, lettuce. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.