Name: Walnut Salad
Ingredients: 20 fresh English walnuts; Lettuce; Mayonnaise or French dressing

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 ↓

Walnut Salad

Ingredients

20 fresh English walnuts
Lettuce
Mayonnaise or French dressing

Directions

Prepare the walnuts

Remove the shells from the walnuts.
Boil the walnuts in water, then drain and skin them.

Serve

Serve the walnuts on a bed of lettuce with mayonnaise or French 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.

Walnut + lettucetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together491 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Walnuts: Provide the main nutty flavour and crunchy texture of the salad.
Lettuce: Forms the crisp base that holds the walnuts and dressing.
Mayonnaise or french dressing: Adds moisture, richness and tang to coat the salad.

“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.