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Orange and Walnut Salad

A salad of peeled orange segments and toasted walnuts, layered with lettuce and dressed with salad dressing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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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 ↓

Orange and Walnut Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel the oranges, removing all the inner white skin, and chill them on ice for several hours.

  2. Divide the oranges into lobes, then cut each lobe into three pieces.

  3. Crack the walnuts and boil them in water for 3 minutes, then drain and remove the skins.

  4. Break the walnuts into small bits.

Assemble and serve

  1. Line a salad bowl with lettuce and arrange the oranges and walnuts in alternate layers.

  2. Cover each layer with salad dressing and serve immediately.

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. Walnut + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together491 recipes

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

  2. Orange + lettucetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together373 recipes

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

  3. Orange + walnuttop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Oranges
Provide juicy segments, sweetness and acidity that balance the salad's richness.
English walnuts
Add crunch and a nutty, slightly bitter flavour that contrasts with the fruit.
Salad dressing
Adds moisture and flavour to each layer, so the salad is not dry.

The step that matters

Removing the walnut skins after boiling. Boiling loosens the papery skins so they slip off easily. Leftover skin can taste bitter and leave a tough, papery texture in the salad.

Swap the orange

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against walnut, lettuce. 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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