Name: Celery Root Salad
Ingredients: celery root; hot vinegar; water; French dressing or mayonnaise; parsley; lettuce; tomato puree or string beans or green peas; bread

Why it works: Celery and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,810 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Celery Root Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Wash and boil the celery roots with the skins until tender.
Peel the roots and cut them into slices.
In a big bowl, pour hot vinegar diluted with water over the slices and let stand for 15 minutes.
Drain off the liquid and mix the roots with French dressing or mayonnaise.
Flavor with parsley and serve with lettuce and tomato puree or string beans or green peas and bread.

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 + parsleytop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together6,810 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Celery + lettucetop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,033 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).
Celery + tomatotop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together3,377 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Parsley + lettucetop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,483 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).
Lettuce + tomatotop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,655 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

Swap the tomato

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

Mustardfits better
Shallotfits better
Beetrootfits better
Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against celery, vinegar, parsley, lettuce, bread. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.