Skip to main content
Salad

Apple Salad

Apple salad is a lettuce-based dish with apples, onions, parsley, and dressing, optionally topped with nuts.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lettuce and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,483 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Apple Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Arrange lettuce in a salad bowl.

  2. Add chopped or sliced apples, onions, and parsley.

Dress and serve

  1. Mix with French dressing or mayonnaise dressing.

  2. Sprinkle with Grapenuts or ryenuts if desired.

  3. Serve with fish, meat, or cheese.

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. Lettuce + parsleytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,483 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  2. Lettuce + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,562 recipes

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

  3. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

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

  4. Lettuce + appletop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together515 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  5. Apple + oniontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,206 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

What each ingredient does

Lettuce
Forms the crisp base that holds the other ingredients.
Apples
Adds crisp texture and a sweet, juicy contrast to the greens.
Onions
Adds sharp aroma and bite that balances the sweet apples.
French or mayonnaise dressing
Coats the salad with moisture and flavour; mayonnaise adds richness, French dressing adds acidity.

The step that matters

Mix with the dressing. Toss the apples with dressing soon after cutting them. The acid in French dressing slows the browning of cut apple flesh, which occurs when its surface is exposed to air. Mayonnaise offers less of this protection.

Swap the apple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lettuce, onion, parsley):

  1. Avocadofits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Lemonfits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lettuce, onion, parsley. 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.

More apple salad recipes

Baked 3 See all 45 →

You might also like

Chicken SaladChicken Salad623 recipesSalad DressingSalad Dressing491 recipesTomato SaladTomato Salad179 recipesCold SlawCold Slaw160 recipes