Skip to main content
Salad

Turkey Salad

A salad of cooked turkey, chestnuts, and apples seasoned with salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Chestnut and apple work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 95 recipes. Both carry ethyl pentanoate, which smells yeast, fruit. The science ↓

Turkey Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Boil chestnuts for 30 minutes, then shell them and place in cold water to remove the inner brown skin.

  2. Cut chestnuts into quarters and lightly salt them.

  3. Peel and dice the apples.

Assemble

  1. Combine all ingredients just before serving and add your preferred 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. Chestnut + appletop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together95 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl pentanoate (yeast, fruit).

  2. Turkey + chestnuttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together136 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Turkey + meattop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together540 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  4. Turkey + appletop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together75 recipes

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

  5. Meat + chestnuttop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together164 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Dark turkey meat
Provides savory, meaty body, and its higher fat content keeps it moist.
Chestnuts
Add a starchy, mildly sweet texture that gives the salad substance.
Apples
Add crisp texture and a fresh, lightly tart sweetness that balances the meat.

The step that matters

Removing the inner brown skin from the chestnuts. The thin inner skin is tough and bitter, so leaving it on makes the chestnuts less pleasant to eat. Boiling and then soaking in cold water help it come away.

Swap the apple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (turkey, meat, chestnut):

  1. Figfits better
  2. Coconutfits about as well
  3. Vanillafits about as well
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against turkey, meat, chestnut. 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.

You might also like

Chicken SaladChicken Salad623 recipesSalad DressingSalad Dressing491 recipesTomato SaladTomato Salad179 recipesCold SlawCold Slaw160 recipes