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Salad

Prune and Nut Salad

A salad of prunes filled with nuts, served on lettuce with French dressing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Prune and Nut Salad

serves 4 or 5 prunes per portion

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the prunes

  1. Soak the prunes and bring them to a boil.

  2. Cool the prunes and carefully remove the stones.

  3. Fill the cavities of the prunes with nut meats.

Serve

  1. Serve 4 or 5 prunes on a nest of lettuce leaves with French dressing.

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. Walnut + almondtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together993 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Almond + lettucetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together210 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  4. Walnut + pecanstop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  5. Almond + pecanstop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together431 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Prunes
Provide the sweet, soft fruit that forms the body of the salad.
Walnuts
Add crunch and a rich, slightly bitter flavour against the sweet prunes.
Blanched almonds
Add crisp texture and mild nutty flavour inside the prunes.
Pecans
Add buttery crunch and nutty richness to the filling.

The step that matters

Cool the prunes before stuffing. Hot, soft prunes tear and deform easily, so cooling them first keeps the fruit intact while the stones are removed and the cavities are filled.

Swap the pecans

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

  1. Cashew nutfits better
  2. Pistachiofits better
  3. Brazil nutfits better
  4. Pecansthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against walnut, almond, 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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