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Salad

Apples— Cress Salad

A salad of watercress, sliced tart apple, pecan nuts, and Hygia dressing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Watercress and nuts share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Apples— Cress Salad

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Wash the watercress thoroughly and place it in a salad bowl.

  2. Thinly slice the tart apple and cover the watercress with the slices.

  3. Sprinkle the pecan nuts over the apple slices.

  4. Drizzle with Hygia dressing.

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. Watercress + nutstop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Watercress + appletop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Apple + nutstop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together237 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Watercress
Provides a peppery, fresh leafy base that gives the salad its main body.
Tart apple
Adds crisp texture and a sharp acidity that balances the dressing.
Pecan nuts
Add crunch and a rich, buttery flavour against the crisp leaves and apple.

Swap the apple

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against watercress, nuts. 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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