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Salad

Pineapple and Cheese Salad

A salad of lettuce, pineapple, cheese, celery, mayonnaise, and walnuts.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Lettuce and walnut 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 ↓

Pineapple and Cheese Salad

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Arrange crisp lettuce leaves on a serving plate.

  2. Place sliced canned pineapple rings on the lettuce.

  3. Fill the center with a mixture of cubed cheese and celery.

  4. Top with mayonnaise dressing.

  5. Sprinkle with chopped English walnuts and serve.

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. Lettuce + walnuttop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together491 recipes

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

  2. Lettuce + celerytop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,033 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  3. Celery + walnuttop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together852 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  4. Lettuce + pineappletop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together271 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  5. Pineapple + walnuttop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together465 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

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

What each ingredient does

Mayonnaise dressing
Adds richness and moisture, binding the cheese and celery with a creamy coating.
Cheese
Adds savory richness and a creamy bite that balances the sweet pineapple.
Canned pineapple
Provides sweetness and juiciness, with acidity that cuts the richness of the dressing.
English walnuts
Adds crunch and a toasty, nutty flavour against the soft ingredients.

Swap the pineapple

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

  1. Avocadofits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Limefits better
  4. Pineapplethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lettuce, cheese, celery, walnut. 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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