Name: Lettuce and Celery Salad
Ingredients: 1 head of lettuce; 1 cup celery, cut into 1-inch pieces

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 ↓

Lettuce and Celery Salad

Ingredients

1 head of lettuce
1 cup celery, cut into 1-inch pieces

Directions

Prepare

Wash and dry the lettuce.
Tear the lettuce into bite-sized pieces and place in a salad bowl.

Assemble and serve

Add the cut celery on top of the lettuce.
Toss gently to combine.

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.

Lettuce + celerytop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,033 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Lettuce: Forms the leafy base and provides the crisp, watery bulk of the salad.
Celery: Adds crunch and a mild, fresh flavor that contrasts with the soft lettuce.

“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.