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Salad

Orange Salad

A salad of sliced tart oranges dressed with oil, lemon juice, salt, and cayenne pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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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

  1. Slice the oranges and remove the seeds.

  2. Arrange the slices on a salad dish.

  3. Dress the oranges with salad oil, a squeeze of lemon juice, coarse sea salt, and cayenne pepper.

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. 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, juice, and tart flavour of the salad.
Salad oil
Adds richness and carries flavour across the orange slices.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sweetness of the oranges.

Swap the orange

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against 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.

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