Name: Celery Salad
Ingredients: 1 head of celery; 1 head of lettuce; salad dressing

Why it works: Celery and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,033 recipes. Both carry nonanal, which smells fat, citrus. The science ↓

Celery Salad

Ingredients

1 head of celery
1 head of lettuce
salad dressing

Directions

Prepare

Pull the celery into pieces and wash it.
Cut the celery into small pieces.
Shred the lettuce and lay it at the bottom of the dish.

Assemble and serve

Stir the celery into the dressing and lay it on top of the lettuce.
Cover with more lettuce 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.

Celery + lettucetop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,033 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Celery: Provides the crisp, watery bulk and fresh crunch of the salad.
Lettuce: Forms a crisp, leafy base and cover that holds the salad together.
Salad dressing: Adds moisture and flavour that coats the celery and lettuce.

“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.