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Walnut Salad

A salad of boiled walnuts, celery, onion, and mayonnaise served on lettuce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Walnut and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 491 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Walnut Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the walnuts

  1. Boil the walnuts in salted water for about 10 minutes with the sliced onion, peppercorns, bay leaf, and mace.

  2. After boiling, plunge the walnuts into cold water and remove the skins.

Assemble and serve

  1. Cut the celery into small pieces.

  2. Mix the walnuts with the celery and moisten well with mayonnaise.

  3. Serve in small portions on young lettuce leaves.

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. Walnut + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together491 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. Walnut + celerytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together852 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  4. Celery + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,518 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Onion + lettucetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,562 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

What each ingredient does

Walnuts
Provide the main body and nutty crunch of the salad.
Celery
Adds crisp texture and a fresh, watery crunch against the soft walnuts.
Mayonnaise (in the method)
Adds fat and moisture, binding the salad and coating the walnuts and celery.

The step that matters

Removing the walnut skins after boiling. Plunging the walnuts into cold water right after boiling stops the cooking and loosens the bitter papery skins, so they peel off easily. Letting them cool slowly makes the skins cling and the nuts go soft.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against walnut, celery, onion, 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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