Skip to main content

Apple and Nut Salad

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lettuce and celery 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 ↓

Apple and Nut Salad

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Chop equal portions of green apples and nut meat.

  2. Mix with mayonnaise dressing to moisten.

  3. Place the mixture on a crisp lettuce leaf.

  4. Cover with additional mayonnaise dressing.

  5. Garnish with olives, celery leaves, and slices of hard-boiled eggs.

  6. Serve on a large platter.

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. Lettuce + celerytop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,033 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  2. Lettuce + olivetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,580 recipes

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

  3. Olive + celerytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,667 recipes

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

  4. Apple + celerytop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,155 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methoxy-4-vinylphenol (clove, smoky).

  5. Apple + olivetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,565 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, fruity).

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

Swap the apple

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

  1. Avocadofits better
  2. Lemonfits better
  3. Limefits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, lettuce, olive, celery, egg. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

You might also like