Name: Mayonnaise of Celery
Ingredients: 1 ½ cups white celery, cut into ½ inch lengths; ¼ teaspoon salt; ¼ teaspoon pepper; ½ cup mayonnaise dressing

Why it works: Celery and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 16,012 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Mayonnaise of Celery

Ingredients

1 ½ cups white celery, cut into ½ inch lengths
¼ teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon pepper
½ cup mayonnaise dressing

Directions

In a bowl, season the celery with salt and pepper.
Mix in the mayonnaise dressing, using ½ cup for every 1 ½ cups of 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.

Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Celery: Provides the crisp, fresh-textured bulk of the salad.
Mayonnaise dressing: Adds fat and creaminess that coats the celery and gives the salad its body.

“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.