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Salad

Grape Fruit Salad

A salad of diced grapefruit, celery, and grapes tossed with mayonnaise and served on lettuce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Grapefruit and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 118 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Grape Fruit Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Dice the grapefruit and celery.

  2. Seed the grapes.

Assemble and serve

  1. Mix the grapefruit, celery, and grapes with mayonnaise dressing.

  2. Serve the mixture on a bed of lettuce.

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. Grapefruit + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together118 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  3. Grapefruit + celerytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together58 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methoxy-4-vinylphenol (clove, smoky).

  4. Grapefruit + grapetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together79 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-p-menthene-8-thiol (grapefruit).

  5. Grape + lettucetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together349 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Grapefruit
Provides juicy sweetness and a bright, acidic citrus flavour to the salad.
Celery
Adds crisp texture that contrasts with the soft fruit and dressing.
Grapes
Add sweetness and juiciness to balance the tart grapefruit.
Mayonnaise dressing
Adds fat and creaminess that binds the fruit and celery together.

Swap the grape

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against grapefruit, celery, lettuce. 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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