Skip to main content
Salad

Orange Salad

A salad of peeled orange sections dressed with olive oil, lemon juice, pepper, salt, and cayenne.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Orange and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Orange Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel and section the oranges, removing pips and skin.

  2. Place the orange sections in a salad dish.

Dress and serve

  1. In a bowl, mix olive oil, lemon juice, mixed pepper, salt, and cayenne pepper.

  2. Pour the dressing over the oranges and serve.

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. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  3. Olive + lemontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,922 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  4. Orange + olivetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,456 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  5. Orange + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,402 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl 2-methylbutyrate (fruity, apple).

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

What each ingredient does

Oranges
Provide the main body, sweetness and juicy texture of the salad.
Olive oil
Adds fat and a smooth, rich mouthfeel to the dressing.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and balances the sweetness of the oranges.

Swap the orange

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (olive, lemon, pepper):

  1. Limefits better
  2. Orangethe original
  3. Avocadofits less well
  4. Cherryfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against olive, lemon, pepper. 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.

More orange salad recipes

You might also like