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Salad

Summer Salad

A chilled salad of cubed pineapple, sliced celery, pecan nuts, and mayonnaise, garnished with pecan nuts, sliced pimolas, lettuce, and hard‑boiled eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Celery and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,033 recipes. Both carry nonanal, which smells fat, citrus. The science ↓

Summer Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pare, peel, and cube the ripe pineapple.

  2. Slice the tender celery.

Make and serve the salad

  1. In a bowl, mix the pineapple, celery, and broken pecan nuts.

  2. Moisten the mixture with mayonnaise.

  3. Mound the salad on a serving plate and smear with additional mayonnaise.

  4. Garnish with pecan nuts, sliced pimolas, young German lettuce, and sliced hard-boiled eggs.

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

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  2. Pineapple + lettucetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together271 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  3. Nuts + lettucetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together174 recipes

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

  4. Pineapple + nutstop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together162 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  5. Pineapple + celerytop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together230 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

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

What each ingredient does

Pineapple
Provides sweetness and juicy moisture that contrasts with the crunchy celery and nuts.
Celery
Adds crisp texture and a fresh, mild vegetal bite.
Pecan nuts
Add crunch and a toasty, buttery flavour against the soft fruit.
Mayonnaise
Adds fat and creaminess that binds the salad and moistens the ingredients.

Swap the pineapple

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against celery, nuts, lettuce, egg. 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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