Name: Salad of Celery , Cabbage , and Beets
Ingredients: equal quantities of celery; equal quantities of cold slaw; pickled beets, cut fine; remoulade sauce or Sydney Smith’s salad dressing

Why it works: Celery and sauce are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 23% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,360 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Salad of Celery , Cabbage , and Beets

Ingredients

equal quantities of celery
equal quantities of cold slaw
pickled beets, cut fine
remoulade sauce or Sydney Smith’s salad dressing

Directions

Prepare

Prepare equal quantities of celery and cold slaw.
Mix in the bulk of pickled beets, cut fine.
Set the mixture aside in the refrigerator.

Dress and serve

Add remoulade sauce or Sydney Smith's salad dressing and mix well.
Let stand for no more than 10 minutes.
Serve very cold.

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.

Celery + saucetop 23% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together2,360 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Celery: Provides crisp, crunchy texture that holds up in the salad.
Cold slaw: Adds the bulk of the salad and its crisp, fresh body.
Pickled beets: Add sharp acidity and a vivid colour to the salad.
Remoulade sauce: Supplies fat and tangy flavour that coats and binds the vegetables.

The step that matters

Letting the salad stand. Standing no more than 10 minutes keeps the celery and slaw crisp, since the dressing's salt and acid draw water out of vegetables over time and make them limp.

“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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Salad of Celery , Cabbage , and Beets