Name: Nut Salad
Ingredients: 2 cups lightly chopped black walnuts, English walnuts, or hickory nuts; 2 cups chopped celery; salad dressing to taste

Why it works: Walnut and celery 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 ↓

Nut Salad

Ingredients

2 cups lightly chopped black walnuts, English walnuts, or hickory nuts
2 cups chopped celery
salad dressing to taste

Directions

In a large bowl, combine the chopped nuts and celery.
Add enough salad dressing to coat the mixture well.
Toss gently to amalgamate all ingredients.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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 + celerytop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together852 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Walnuts: Provide crunch and a rich, slightly bitter nutty flavour that contrasts the celery.
Celery: Adds crisp, fresh texture and mild, vegetal crunch to the salad.
Salad dressing: Coats the nuts and celery, adding moisture and flavour to the whole salad.

“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.