Name: Apple Nut Salad
Ingredients: French chestnuts; celery; tart apples; mayonnaise dressing; lettuce leaves

Why it works: Chestnut and lettuce share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 64 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Apple Nut Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Boil and peel the French chestnuts, then cut them into small pieces.
Mix the chestnuts with chopped celery and tart apples cut into slender strips.
Pour mayonnaise dressing over the salad.
Serve the salad on lettuce leaves.

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.

Chestnut + lettucetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together64 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Celery + lettucetop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,033 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).
Chestnut + celerytop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together231 recipes

Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).
Chestnut + appletop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together95 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl pentanoate (yeast, fruit).
Celery + appletop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,155 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-methoxy-4-vinylphenol (clove, smoky).