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Salad

Celery and Nut Salad

A salad of celery, Brazil nuts, mayonnaise, orange, lettuce, and red peppers.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Brazil nut and lettuce share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12 recipes. Both carry 2-nonanone, which smells fruity, floral. The science ↓

Celery and Nut Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the celery into small pieces.

  2. Remove the brown covering from the Brazil nuts and chop or slice them.

  3. Use twice the amount of celery as nut meats.

Assemble and serve

  1. Toss the celery and nuts together and mix with mayonnaise.

  2. Arrange each portion on a thick slice of orange set in a nest of lettuce leaves.

  3. Mask with mayonnaise and sprinkle with chopped red peppers.

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. Brazil nut + lettucetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together12 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

  2. Celery + lettucetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,033 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  3. Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

  4. Lettuce + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,037 recipes

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

  5. Orange + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,402 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl 2-methylbutyrate (fruity, apple).

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

What each ingredient does

Hearts of crisp celery
Provides the crisp, watery texture that contrasts with the soft mayonnaise.
Brazil nuts
Add rich, oily flavour and a crunchy bite to the salad.
Mayonnaise
Binds the celery and nuts and adds fat and creaminess.
Peeled and seeded orange
Adds sweetness and acidity that cut through the rich mayonnaise and nuts.

Swap the brazil nut

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

  1. Beansfits better
  2. Chickpeafits better
  3. Walnutfits better
  4. Brazil nutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against celery, orange, lettuce, pepper. 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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