Name: English Walnut Salad
Ingredients: choice English walnut meats; minced oranges; pure olive oil; crisp watercress; coarse sea salt; black pepper

Why it works: Walnut and watercress share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 71 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

English Walnut Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Place walnut meats in a salad dish on a bed of minced oranges.
Drizzle lightly with olive oil and set aside for several hours.
Wash and pick over the watercress, then sprinkle with salt and pepper.
Add the fruit and nut mixture to the watercress and serve as cold as possible.

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 + watercresstop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together71 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Walnut + olivetop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,087 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).
Orange + olivetop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,456 recipes

Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).
Olive + watercresstop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together684 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Orange + watercresstop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together98 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

Swap the orange

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (walnut, meat, olive, watercress, pepper):

Avocadofits better
Limefits better
Lemonfits better
Orangethe original

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