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Salad

Nut and Celery Salad

A salad of toasted walnuts, sliced celery, and cream dressing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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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 and Celery Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the walnuts

  1. Combine walnuts, onion, and salt in a saucepan.

  2. Cover with boiling water and boil until tender, about 30 minutes.

  3. Drain and transfer to ice water to blanch.

  4. Dry the walnuts with a towel and rub off the skins.

Assemble the salad

  1. Slice the celery.

  2. Mix the celery with the walnuts and cream dressing.

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Walnut + oniontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,771 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Onion + creamtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,827 recipes

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

  5. Celery + creamtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,863 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-decalactone (peach, creamy).

Onion and cream barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 10,827 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Walnuts
Provide the main crunchy texture and nutty flavor of the salad.
Celery
Adds crisp texture and fresh moisture that contrasts with the soft walnuts.
Cream dressing
Adds fat and richness, coating the walnuts and celery and adding moisture.

The step that matters

Boil the walnuts until tender. Long simmering softens the dense nut structure so it chews pleasantly rather than tough. Blanching and rubbing off the skins also removes much of the bitter, astringent flavor from the skins.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Lettucefits better
  2. Spinachfits better
  3. Carrotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against walnut, celery, 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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