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Onion Salad

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Olive and tomato are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 15,539 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Onion Salad

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Dice the required number of Spanish onions and soak them in ice cold water for 1 hour.

  2. Drain the onions and pat them dry with a cloth.

  3. Cut an equal amount of celery into the same size pieces and add to the onions.

  4. Mix with plenty of creamy salad dressing, making it rather tart.

  5. For the dressing, combine one-third Worcestershire sauce, one-third vinegar, and one-third imported olive oil.

  6. Add the juice of 1 lemon, season with coarse sea salt and paprika, and serve cold.

  7. Serve the salad with head lettuce, sliced tomatoes, grated Roquefort cheese, and toasted water crackers.

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. Olive + tomatotop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,539 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Celery + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,467 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  4. Celery + tomatotop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  5. Olive + lettucetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,580 recipes

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

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

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, celery, sauce, vinegar, olive, lettuce, tomato):

  1. Avocadofits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Cherryfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, celery, sauce, vinegar, olive, lettuce, tomato. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

More onion salad recipes

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