Name: Celery and Apple Salad
Ingredients: tender white celery; tart apples; salt; pepper; mayonnaise dressing; lettuce leaves; celery leaves; pomegranate seeds

Why it works: Lettuce and pomegranate share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 35 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Celery and Apple Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Dice the tender white celery, including the heart and leaves.
Season the celery with salt and pepper.
Slice the tart apples into very small, thin pieces.
Mix the diced celery and sliced apples in equal quantities.
Add mayonnaise dressing until the mixture reaches a good consistency.
Serve on lettuce leaves or garnish with celery leaves or pomegranate seeds.

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.

Lettuce + pomegranatetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together35 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).
Celery + lettucetop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,033 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).
Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together16,012 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Celery + pomegranatetop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together21 recipes

Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).
Pepper + pomegranatetop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together234 recipes

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

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

Swap the apple

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

Limefits better
Avocadofits better
Lemonfits better
Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against celery, pepper, lettuce, pomegranate. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.