Name: Celery-and-nut Salad
Ingredients: tender stalks of celery; English walnuts; French dressing; tender leaves of lettuce; curled celery

Why it works: Walnut and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 491 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Celery-and-nut Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Cut the celery and walnuts finely.
Mix them with French dressing.
Garnish the center of the salad and the border with lettuce leaves and bits of curled celery.

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 + lettucetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together491 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).
Celery + lettucetop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,033 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).
Celery + walnuttop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together852 recipes

Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

What each ingredient does

Tender stalks of celery: Provides crisp texture and fresh, mild flavor as the salad's main body.
English walnuts: Adds crunch and a rich, nutty flavor that contrasts with the celery.
French dressing: Adds moisture and acidity, coating the celery and walnuts to bind them together.