Name: Cucumber and Celery Salad
Ingredients: 1 cup cucumber, diced; 1 cup celery, diced; mayonnaise dressing to taste

Why it works: Cucumber and celery are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,745 recipes. Both carry linalool, which smells floral, citrus. The science ↓

Cucumber and Celery Salad

Ingredients

1 cup cucumber, diced
1 cup celery, diced
mayonnaise dressing to taste

Directions

Dice the cucumber and celery into small pieces.
Combine the cucumber and celery in a bowl.
Add mayonnaise dressing to taste and mix well.

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.

Cucumber + celerytop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,745 recipes

Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Cucumber: Adds crisp texture and fresh, cooling moisture to the salad.
Celery: Adds crunch and a mild, fresh vegetable flavor to the salad.
Mayonnaise dressing: Adds fat and creaminess, binding the vegetables and carrying flavor.

“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.