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Salad

Orangb-and-walnut Salad

A salad of thinly sliced oranges and walnuts dressed with oil, salt, and optional lemon juice, served on watercress or lettuce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Orangb-and-walnut Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel the oranges and remove all white skin.

  2. Slice the oranges very thin lengthwise.

  3. Slice the English walnuts.

Assemble and serve

  1. In a bowl, combine 1 pint of orange slices with ½ pint of sliced walnuts.

  2. Dress the salad with 3 tablespoons of oil, ¼ teaspoon of coarse sea salt, and 1 tablespoon of lemon juice if the oranges are sweet.

  3. Serve on a bed of watercress or lettuce.

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. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Lemon + watercresstop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together579 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Walnut + watercresstop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together71 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Orange + watercresstop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Walnut + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,149 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Oranges
Provide the main body of the salad along with juice and a sweet-tart flavor.
English walnuts
Add crunch and a rich, slightly bitter nutty flavor against the juicy orange.
Oil
Adds fat and moisture, carrying flavor and coating the orange and walnut pieces.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the salad and balances sweet oranges.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (orange, walnut, watercress):

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Limefits about as well
  3. Avocadofits less well
  4. Figfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against orange, walnut, watercress. 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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