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Cherry Salad

A salad of cherries dressed with French dressing, served on lettuce with parsley, sherry, bread, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Lettuce and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,483 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Cherry Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Stone the cherries and soak them in French dressing for 30 minutes.

Assemble and serve

  1. Serve the cherries on dressed lettuce leaves.

  2. Sprinkle finely chopped parsley over the salad.

  3. Optionally, drizzle a little sherry over the drained cherries.

  4. Serve with plain bread and butter.

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 + parsleytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,483 recipes

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

  2. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Sherry + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,505 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Sherry + breadtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together682 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Parsley + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Cherries
Provide the main fruit flavour, sweetness and juicy texture of the salad.
French dressing
Adds acidity and oil that season the cherries and coat the leaves.
Lettuce leaves
Form the crisp, cool base that the cherries rest on.
Sherry
Adds a fortified wine aroma and a dry, mellow note to the fruit.

Swap the lettuce

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (parsley, sherry, bread, butter):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Carrotfits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Lettucethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against parsley, sherry, bread, butter. 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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