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Pear and Plum Salad

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Plum and pear match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 245 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Pear and Plum Salad

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Skin the plums, remove the stones, and cut them into neat slices.

  2. Slice the pickled pears.

  3. Arrange the plum and pear slices on a dish.

  4. Sprinkle with salt and pepper.

  5. Cover with mayonnaise sauce.

  6. Decorate the top with chopped truffles 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. Plum + peartop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together245 recipes

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

  2. Plum + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,052 recipes

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

  3. Pear + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together320 recipes

    Shared aroma: butanol (wine).

  4. Sauce + truffletop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,490 recipes
  5. Pepper + truffletop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,106 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

Swap the pear

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

  1. Limefits better
  2. Cherryfits about as well
  3. Lemonfits about as well
  4. Pearthe original

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

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