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Salad

Plum Salad

A salad made with sliced green, red, and blue plums, nuts, lettuce, celery, and olive oil.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Lettuce and celery 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 ↓

Plum Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Remove the stones from the plums and slice them.

  2. Mix the sliced plums with rylax or ryenuts.

Serve

  1. Serve with stale bread and butter.

  2. Add nuts, lettuce, and celery for extra flavor.

  3. Drizzle with olive oil if desired.

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 + celerytop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,033 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  2. Lettuce + olivetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,580 recipes

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

  3. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  4. Plum + olivetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,266 recipes

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

  5. Bread + olivetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,091 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Plums
Provide the fresh fruit base, adding sweetness and a tart juiciness to the salad.
Rylax or ryenuts
Add crunch and a nutty richness that contrasts with the soft, juicy plums.
Olive oil
Adds fat and a smooth, mellow richness that carries the fruit and greens.

Swap the nuts

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (plum, bread, butter, lettuce, celery, olive):

  1. Beansfits better
  2. Chickpeafits better
  3. Almondfits better
  4. Nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against plum, bread, butter, lettuce, celery, olive. 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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