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Salad

Sweet Pepper Salad

A salad of chopped sweet peppers, celery, onion, seasoned with salt and mayonnaise, served on lettuce leaves and garnished with hard boiled eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Celery and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,033 recipes. Both carry nonanal, which smells fat, citrus. The science ↓

Sweet Pepper Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Chop the sweet peppers, celery, and onion.

Assemble and serve

  1. Mix the chopped vegetables with salt and mayonnaise.

  2. Place the mixture in a mound on a bed of lettuce leaves.

  3. Garnish with hard boiled eggs.

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. Celery + lettucetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,033 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  2. Pepper + celerytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Celery + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,518 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Onion + lettucetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,562 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Pepper + lettucetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Mayonnaise
Binds the vegetables together and adds creamy moisture and richness.
Sweet peppers
Provide crisp texture and fresh, mildly sweet flavor.
Celery
Adds crunch and a fresh, savory bite.
Onion
Adds sharp, aromatic flavor that mellows the salad.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Spinachfits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, celery, lettuce, egg. 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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