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English Celery Saxdwiches

A chilled sandwich of chopped celery, olives, walnuts, and mayonnaise on buttered bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Celery and walnut match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 852 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

English Celery Saxdwiches

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. In a bowl, combine chopped celery, olives, and walnuts.

  2. Moisten the mixture with mayonnaise dressing until it forms a paste.

Assemble and chill

  1. Spread the mixture on thin slices of buttered bread.

  2. Place the sandwiches in a cold place until ready to serve.

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

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

  2. Olive + walnuttop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,087 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  3. Olive + breadtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,091 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Celery + olivetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,667 recipes

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

  5. Celery + breadtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,110 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Celery
Provides crisp texture and a fresh, mildly vegetal flavour to the filling.
English walnuts
Add crunch and a rich, slightly bitter nuttiness that contrasts the soft filling.
Mayonnaise dressing
Adds moisture and fat, binding the chopped ingredients into a spreadable paste.
Buttered bread
Provides the sandwich base and a layer of fat that keeps the bread from soaking up moisture.

The step that matters

Moisten the mixture with mayonnaise dressing until it forms a paste. Too little dressing leaves the filling dry and crumbly, while too much makes it runny and soaks the bread. Adding it gradually lets the cook reach a spreadable consistency.

Swap the celery

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

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Parsleyfits about as well
  3. Sagefits about as well
  4. Celerythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against olive, walnut, bread. 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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