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Salad

Apple Salad

A salad of boiled apples, raisins, nuts, and lettuce, served with dressing or whipped cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Nuts and raisin work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 490 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Apple Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Poach the apples

  1. Peel and core the apples, leaving them whole.

  2. Place the apples in a pan and cover with boiling water.

  3. Simmer until tender, then add the pink vegetable tablet.

  4. Once the apples are well colored, remove them to cool.

Fill and serve

  1. Fill the cooled apples with chopped raisins and nuts.

  2. Serve on a bed of lettuce with dressing or whipped cream.

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. Nuts + raisintop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together490 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Nuts + lettucetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together174 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

  3. Apple + raisintop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,920 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  4. Lettuce + raisintop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together29 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

  5. 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
Main body of the salad; they soften when simmered and take on the tablet's color.
Pink vegetable tablet
Colors the apples pink during simmering, giving the salad its visual appeal.
Chopped nuts
Add crunch that contrasts with the soft, tender apples.
Chopped raisins
Add chewy texture and natural sweetness to the filling.
Cooked dressing or whipped cream
Adds richness and moisture to balance the fruit and nuts.

The step that matters

Simmering until tender. Apples cooked too briefly stay firm and hard to fill, while overcooking makes them collapse. Checking for tenderness with a knife keeps them whole and holding their filling.

Swap the apple

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Coconutfits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against nuts, lettuce, raisin, cream. 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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