Skip to main content
Salad

Nut and Celery Salad

A salad of celery, lettuce, and nuts tossed with mayonnaise.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Celery and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,033 recipes. Both carry nonanal, which smells fat, citrus. The science ↓

Nut and Celery Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the celery into ½ inch pieces.

  2. Shred the lettuce by stacking several leaves, folding, and cutting quickly with a knife.

  3. Break the nut meats into eighths.

Assemble and serve

  1. In a bowl, toss together the celery, shredded lettuce, and nut meats with mayonnaise.

  2. Arrange a rosette of lettuce leaves on a plate and create an attractive mound of the nut mixture in the center.

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. Celery + lettucetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,033 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  2. Meat + lettucetop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together579 recipes

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

  3. Celery + meattop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,880 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Celery
Adds crisp texture and a fresh, mild crunch to the salad.
Nut meats
Add crunch and a rich, slightly fatty flavor that balances the crisp vegetables.
Mayonnaise
Adds fat and moisture, binding the mixture and coating the pieces.

Swap the celery

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

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Thymefits about as well
  4. Celerythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, 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.

You might also like

Chicken SaladChicken Salad623 recipesSalad DressingSalad Dressing491 recipesTomato SaladTomato Salad179 recipesCold SlawCold Slaw160 recipes