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Salad

Red Pumpkin Salad

A salad made from boiled pumpkin, onion, chillies, coconut milk, lime juice and sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Coconut and lime match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 934 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Red Pumpkin Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pumpkin

  1. Skin and cut the pumpkin into small pieces.

  2. Wash the pumpkin.

  3. Boil the pumpkin in salted water until cooked.

  4. Drain the water.

Make the salad

  1. Mix in the minced onion and chopped chillies.

  2. Add more salt if necessary.

  3. Stir in the strained coconut milk and lime juice gradually.

  4. Taste to avoid excessive acidity.

  5. If limes are unavailable, substitute with a little vinegar.

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. Coconut + limetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together934 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Coconut + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,648 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Pumpkin + coconuttop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together302 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity).

  4. Onion + limetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,263 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Onion + coconuttop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,831 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Pumpkin
Forms the bulk of the salad and becomes soft and tender when boiled.
Coconut milk
Adds richness and a creamy body that softens the sharpness of the lime.
Lime juice
Adds sourness that brightens the flavour and balances the coconut milk.
Onion
Adds sharp, savoury bite and aroma to the salad.

The step that matters

Stir in the lime juice gradually and taste as you go. Acid added in one go can overpower the dish and can curdle or thin the coconut milk. Adding it slowly, tasting between additions, lets you stop at a balanced sourness.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pumpkin, coconut, milk, lime):

  1. Sweet potatofits better
  2. Arrowrootfits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pumpkin, coconut, milk, lime. 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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