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Salad

Grape Fruit Salad

A salad of grapefruit, celery, walnuts, mayonnaise, and lettuce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Grapefruit and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 118 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Grape Fruit Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Use ½ grapefruit per person.

  2. Use ½ as much celery as grapefruit.

  3. Shell and break up about 70 walnuts into small pieces per person.

Assemble and serve

  1. Mix all ingredients together with mayonnaise dressing.

  2. Serve on a bed of 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. Grapefruit + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together118 recipes

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

  2. Walnut + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together491 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  4. Celery + walnuttop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together852 recipes

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

  5. Grapefruit + celerytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together58 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Grapefruit
Provides the main fruit body and bright, slightly sharp flavour.
Celery
Adds a crisp, crunchy texture against the soft fruit.
Walnuts
Add crunch and a rich, toasty nuttiness.
Mayonnaise dressing
Adds creaminess and moisture that binds the salad together.

Swap the grapefruit

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

  1. Avocadofits better
  2. Limefits about as well
  3. Grapefruitthe original
  4. Lemonfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against celery, walnut, 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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