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Salad

Prune or Date Salad

A salad of soaked prunes stuffed with nuts and marshmallow, served on lettuce with cream dressing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Nuts and lettuce work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 174 recipes. Both carry 2-nonanone, which smells fruity, floral. The science ↓

Prune or Date Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the prunes

  1. Soak the prunes overnight.

  2. Cook the prunes until tender, then let them cool.

  3. Remove the seeds from the prunes and stuff them with chopped nut meats and marshmallow pieces.

  4. Boil the nuts.

Assemble and serve

  1. Place 3 or 4 stuffed prunes on a bed of lettuce leaves.

  2. Serve with cream salad dressing.

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. Nuts + lettucetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together174 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

  2. Meat + nutstop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together111 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

  3. Meat + lettucetop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together579 recipes

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

  4. Nuts + creamtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together886 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

  5. Meat + creamtop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,248 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

What each ingredient does

Prunes
Provide the main body and sweetness once softened by soaking and cooking.
Nuts
Add crunch and a contrast in texture to the soft prune filling.
Marshmallow
Softens within the prune and adds sweetness and a chewy filling.
Cream salad dressing
Adds richness and fat that balances the sweet prunes.

The step that matters

Cook the prunes until tender, then let them cool. Overcooked prunes split and lose their shape, so they cannot hold the filling well. Letting them cool before stuffing keeps the skins intact and stops the marshmallow from melting out of the prune.

Swap the lettuce

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, nuts, cream):

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Spinachfits better
  3. Lettucethe original
  4. Mustardfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, nuts, cream. 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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