Skip to main content
Salad

Pear Salad

A salad of canned pears marinated in French dressing, served on lettuce with candied cherries, nuts, and mayonnaise dressing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Pear and lettuce share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Pear Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Marinate the canned pears in French dressing.

  2. Arrange the marinated pears on lettuce leaves.

  3. Decorate with candied cherries.

  4. Add nuts if desired.

Serve

  1. Serve with a little mayonnaise 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. Pear + lettucetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together92 recipes

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

  2. Lettuce + nutstop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together174 recipes

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

  3. Pear + nutstop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together26 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl decanoate (grape, waxy).

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

What each ingredient does

Canned pears
Provide the sweet, soft fruit that forms the body of the salad.
French dressing
Adds acidity and seasoning, flavoring the pears as they marinate.
Mayonnaise dressing
Adds richness and fat, giving a creamy finish to the fruit.

Swap the nuts

The recipe marks nuts as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pear, lettuce):

  1. Chestnutfits better
  2. Walnutfits better
  3. Hazelnutfits better
  4. Nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pear, lettuce. 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.

More pear salad recipes

Alligator 5 See all 15 →

You might also like

Chicken SaladChicken Salad623 recipesSalad DressingSalad Dressing491 recipesTomato SaladTomato Salad179 recipesCold SlawCold Slaw160 recipes