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Salad

Nut-celery Salad

A salad of toasted walnuts, sliced celery, and French dressing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Walnut and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 852 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Nut-celery Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the walnuts

  1. In a saucepan, combine walnuts, onion, and salt.

  2. Cover with boiling water and boil for 30 minutes.

  3. Transfer to cold water to blanch.

  4. Dry on a towel and rub off the thin skins.

Assemble the salad

  1. Mix the nuts with sliced celery and add French dressing to taste.

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 + celerytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together852 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  2. Onion + celerytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,518 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Walnut + oniontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,771 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Walnuts
Provide the main body and nutty flavour of the salad.
Celery
Adds crisp texture and fresh, mild flavour against the soft nuts.
French dressing
Adds moisture, acidity and sweetness that coat the nuts and celery.

The step that matters

Boiling the walnuts and rubbing off the skins. Boiling softens the walnuts and loosens their bitter papery skins, so they can be rubbed off cleanly. Drying the nuts well before dressing keeps the salad from becoming watery and the dressing from thinning.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Lettucefits better
  2. Carrotfits better
  3. Parsnipfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against walnut, celery. 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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