Name: Celery and Apple Salad
Ingredients: 1 bunch of crisp white celery; 1 green pepper; 1 teaspoon chopped pimento; 2 tart apples; ½ pint whipped cream; Lettuce or other leaves for garnish; Radishes for garnish

Why it works: Lettuce and radish share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 58 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Celery and Apple Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Cut the celery into small bits, about ¼ inch thick.
Chop the green pepper and pimento finely.
Mix the chopped celery, green pepper, pimento, and mayonnaise together.
Dice the apples, using ¼ the amount of apple as celery.
Just before serving, combine the apple with the celery mixture and fold in the whipped cream.
Mound the salad on a flat dish and garnish with lettuce leaves and radishes.

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.

Lettuce + radishtop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together58 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).
Celery + lettucetop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,033 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).
Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together16,012 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Celery + radishtop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together101 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-methoxy-4-vinylphenol (clove, smoky).
Pepper + lettucetop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,037 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

Swap the apple

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

Limefits better
Avocadofits better
Lemonfits better
Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against celery, pepper, cream, lettuce, radish. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.