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Salad

Orange and Walnut Salad

A salad of chilled orange segments and walnut pieces served in lettuce cups with mayonnaise dressing and whipped cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 ↓

Orange and Walnut Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the oranges

  1. Peel the oranges, removing all the white inner skin, and chill them on ice for several hours.

  2. Once cold, divide each lobe into 3 or 4 pieces.

Prepare the walnuts

  1. Boil the walnut meats in water for 3 minutes.

  2. Drain the walnut meats and remove the skin.

  3. Break the walnuts into small pieces and mix them with the oranges and mayonnaise dressing.

Serve

  1. Serve in lettuce cups topped with a spoonful of 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. Walnut + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together491 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Orange + walnuttop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  4. Walnut + creamtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,982 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

  5. Lettuce + creamtop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,121 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Oranges
Provide the juicy, sweet-tart fruit body and fresh flavour of the salad.
English walnuts
Add a crunchy texture that contrasts with the soft fruit and dressing.
Mayonnaise dressing
Adds fat and creaminess that binds the oranges and walnuts together.
Whipped cream
Adds a light, rich fat topping that softens the salad's tartness.

The step that matters

Remove the white inner skin from the oranges. The white pith is bitter, so leaving it on can make the salad taste harsh. Chilling the oranges firms the segments and makes them easier to cut cleanly.

Swap the orange

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

  1. Avocadofits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against walnut, lettuce, 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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