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Salad

Grape Fruit Salad

A salad of grapefruit and lemon segments with walnuts, onion, salt, and mayonnaise dressing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Grapefruit and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 184 recipes. Both carry (e,e)-2,4-decadienal, which smells fatty, deep fried. The science ↓

Grape Fruit Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Remove the peel and white pith from the grapefruit and lemons.

  2. Separate the grapefruit and lemons into sections, removing skins and seeds.

  3. Cut the sections into small pieces without breaking the juice sacs.

Assemble and serve

  1. In a bowl, combine all ingredients and toss lightly with two forks.

  2. Chill the salad on ice.

  3. Serve in salad cups or on a lettuce leaf, drizzling with mayonnaise dressing.

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 + lemontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together184 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  2. Lemon + walnuttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,149 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Grapefruit + walnuttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together46 recipes

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

  4. Onion + walnuttop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,771 recipes

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

  5. Grapefruit + oniontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together76 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Grapefruit
Provides the bulk of the fresh, sharp citrus flavour and juicy texture.
Walnuts
Add crunch and a slightly bitter, toasty note that contrasts the soft fruit.
Mayonnaise dressing
Adds richness and fat that softens the citrus acidity and binds the salad.

The step that matters

Cut the sections without breaking the juice sacs. Breaking the thin membranes releases juice early, making the salad watery and dulling the texture. Keeping the sacs intact holds the juice inside each piece until eating.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Lettucefits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against grapefruit, lemon, walnut. 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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