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Salad

Celery, English Walnut and Pimento Salad

A salad of sliced celery, walnuts and chopped pimentos dressed with mayonnaise and whipped cream, served in lettuce nests.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Walnut and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 491 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Celery, English Walnut and Pimento Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Make the salad

  1. In a bowl, combine the beaten cream, mayonnaise, sliced celery, English walnuts, and chopped pimentos.

  2. Cut fanciful figures from the pimentos and add them to the mixture.

Serve

  1. Arrange the salad in nests of lettuce.

  2. Garnish each nest with a pimento figure, a walnut, and some celery.

  3. Place celery tips between the nests.

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. Walnut + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together491 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  3. Celery + walnuttop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together852 recipes

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

  4. Cream + celerytop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,863 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-decalactone (peach, creamy).

  5. Cream + walnuttop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,982 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

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

What each ingredient does

Beaten cream
Adds richness and a light, creamy texture to the dressing.
Mayonnaise
Binds the salad and adds fat for a smooth, moist texture.
Sliced celery
Provides crisp texture and fresh, mild flavor.
English walnuts
Adds crunch and a nutty flavor that contrasts the creamy dressing.

Swap the celery

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

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Capersfits about as well
  3. Nutmegfits about as well
  4. Celerythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, walnut, 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.

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