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Salad

Lemon and Apple Salad

A salad of sliced lemons and apples tossed with sugar, pepper, salt, oil, and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Lemon and Apple Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel the lemons and apples.

  2. Core the apples and slice equal quantities of lemon and apples into a dish.

Dress and serve

  1. Season with moist sugar, pepper, and salt.

  2. Dress with oil and vinegar, mix well, 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.

  1. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Pepper + vinegartop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,814 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Lemon + appletop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,551 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  4. Sugar + vinegartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,806 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  5. Apple + vinegartop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,884 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, fruity).

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

What each ingredient does

Apples
Provide the crisp, tart body of the salad.
Lemons
Add sharp acidity and bright aroma that balance the sugar.
Moist sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the sharpness of the lemon and vinegar.
Oil
Adds fat and a smooth mouthfeel to the dressing.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the dressing.

Swap the apple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lemon, sugar, pepper, vinegar):

  1. Limefits better
  2. Orangefits better
  3. Cherryfits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, sugar, pepper, vinegar. 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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