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Cheistmas Salad

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 ↓

Cheistmas Salad

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Remove skins from Malaga grapes, cut in halves lengthwise, and remove seeds.

  2. Add an equal quantity of broken English walnut meats and half as much finely chopped celery.

  3. Moisten the mixture with French Dressing.

  4. Fill small nests made of lettuce leaves with the salad mixture.

  5. Trim saltines on the ends so they can be put together by fours to make squares.

  6. Place four saltine squares on each salad plate and tie them in place with narrow red ribbon.

  7. Insert a portion of salad into each box made with the saltines.

  8. Garnish with sprigs of holly, bright with red berries.

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. Grape + walnuttop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,427 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

  5. Grape + lettucetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together349 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

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

Swap the grape

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

  1. Avocadofits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Lemonfits better
  4. Grapethe original

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

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