Name: Grape Salad
Ingredients: 2 cups Tokay grapes; ½ cup walnuts, chopped; ½ cup celery, chopped; mayonnaise dressing

Why it works: Walnut and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 852 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Grape Salad

Ingredients

2 cups Tokay grapes
½ cup walnuts, chopped
½ cup celery, chopped
mayonnaise dressing

Directions

Halve and seed the Tokay grapes.
Chop the walnuts and celery, then add them to the grapes.
Serve 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.

Walnut + celerytop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together852 recipes

Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).
Grape + walnuttop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,427 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).
Grape + celerytop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together627 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

Tokay grapes: Provide the sweet, juicy base of the salad.
Walnuts: Add crunch and a toasty, nutty contrast to the soft fruit.
Celery: Adds a crisp, fresh crunch that contrasts with the grapes.
Mayonnaise dressing: Adds fat and creaminess that binds the salad and coats the fruit.