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Salad

Nut and Celery Salad

A salad of blanched walnuts, celery, onion, and mayonnaise served in lettuce cups.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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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 and Celery Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the walnuts

  1. In a pan, combine walnut meats, onion, mace, and bay leaf.

  2. Pour boiling water over the mixture and boil for about 10 minutes until walnuts blanch easily.

  3. Drain and dry walnuts with a towel, then cut into small pieces.

Assemble and serve

  1. Mix walnuts with finely-cut celery and mayonnaise dressing.

  2. Form small cups with lettuce and serve the salad in them.

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. Celery + lettucetop 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. Onion + celerytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,518 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Onion + lettucetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,562 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

English walnut meats
Provide the main crunchy texture and nutty flavour of the salad.
Mayonnaise dressing
Adds fat and moisture that bind the salad and mellow its flavours.
Finely-cut celery
Contributes crisp texture and fresh, mildly sharp crunch.

The step that matters

Boiling the walnuts until they blanch easily. Simmering in water with aromatics loosens the papery skins so they slip off, and over-boiling can make the nuts soft and waterlogged, so the timing needs watching.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Macethe original

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