Name: Celery-and-chestnut Salad
Ingredients: chestnuts; celery; French dressing; lettuce leaves; sliced pimentos (optional)

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 ↓

Celery-and-chestnut Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Shell and blanch the chestnuts.
Boil the chestnuts for about 15 minutes or until tender.
Drain and cool the chestnuts.
Cut the cooled chestnuts into quarters.
Add an equal quantity of finely sliced celery.
Dress with French dressing and serve on lettuce leaves.
Optionally, add sliced pimentos.

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).