Skip to main content
Salad

Orange and Nut Salad, Astor Style

A salad of orange segments, walnuts, lettuce, celery, French dressing, and mayonnaise.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Orange and Nut Salad, Astor Style

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Remove the pulp from the oranges.

  2. Cut each orange into eighths and divide the orange pieces into halves.

Marinate and toss

  1. Marinate the orange halves with French dressing.

  2. Marinate the walnut halves in a similar manner.

  3. Toss the oranges and walnuts together lightly with a fork.

Assemble and serve

  1. Arrange each portion in nests of lettuce heart leaves.

  2. Sprinkle with finely chopped celery.

  3. Top 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. Walnut + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together491 recipes

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

  2. Lettuce + celerytop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,033 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  3. Walnut + celerytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together852 recipes

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

  4. Orange + celerytop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together452 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  5. Orange + lettucetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together373 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

Oranges
Provide the fresh juicy fruit that forms the body of the salad.
English walnuts
Add a crunchy texture that contrasts with the soft orange pieces.
French dressing
Adds acidity and sweetness, and moistens the fruit and nuts as they marinate.
Mayonnaise
Adds richness and fat, giving the salad a creamy topping.
Celery hearts
Contribute a crisp, crunchy texture and fresh flavour.

The step that matters

Marinate the orange halves with French dressing. Soaking the fruit in the dressing lets it absorb acidity and sweetness evenly. Handling the pieces lightly keeps them intact so they do not turn mushy or lose their juice.

Swap the orange

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

  1. Avocadofits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Lemonfits better
  4. Orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against walnut, lettuce, celery. 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.

You might also like

Chicken SaladChicken Salad623 recipesSalad DressingSalad Dressing491 recipesTomato SaladTomato Salad179 recipesCold SlawCold Slaw160 recipes