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Salad

Celery and Nut Salad

A salad of celery and nuts mixed with mayonnaise, served on lettuce leaves and garnished with walnuts.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Lettuce and walnut 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 ↓

Celery and Nut Salad

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Mix the celery and nuts with a little mayonnaise.

  2. Serve the mixture on a lettuce leaf with thick mayonnaise on top.

  3. Garnish with half of an English walnut.

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 + walnuttop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together491 recipes

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

  2. Almond + walnuttop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together993 recipes

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

  3. Almond + lettucetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together210 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  4. Celery + lettucetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,033 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  5. Celery + walnuttop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together852 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Celery
Adds crisp texture and fresh, mild crunch to the salad.
Blanched almonds or pecan meats
Adds crunch and a rich, nutty flavour that contrasts with the celery.
Mayonnaise
Binds the celery and nuts together and adds richness and moisture.

Swap the celery

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

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Cinnamonfits better
  4. Celerythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against almond, lettuce, walnut. 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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