Name: Celery Salad
Ingredients: white crisp celery; brown cos lettuce; pepper; coarse sea salt; mayonnaise sauce; watercress

Why it works: Lettuce and watercress match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 307 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Celery Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Clean the heads of celery and brown cos lettuce.
Rinse and drain the vegetables.
Shred the celery and the white parts of the lettuce leaves.
Put the shredded vegetables into a salad bowl.
Season with pepper and coarse sea salt.
Dress with mayonnaise sauce.
Garnish with a few sprays of watercress and serve.

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 + watercresstop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together307 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Celery + lettucetop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,033 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).
Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together16,012 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Celery + watercresstop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together167 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Lettuce + peppertop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,037 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

Swap the celery

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lettuce, pepper, sauce, watercress):

Capersfits better
Tarragonfits better
Parsleyfits better
Celerythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lettuce, pepper, sauce, watercress. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.