Skip to main content
Main

Waldorf Salad

A salad of chopped celery, apples, walnuts, and lettuce, dressed with mayonnaise or a cooked dressing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
Illustration of Waldorf SaladIllustration

Why it works: Walnut and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and 491 recipes mention both. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

The recipe

Ingredients

Contains: egg, tree nuts (auto-detected from the ingredients and method; we can miss things, so check labels)

Directions

Prepare

  1. Chop the celery and apples into equal quantities.

  2. Chop the English walnuts coarsely.

Assemble and serve

  1. Mix the celery, apples, and walnuts together.

  2. Serve the mixture on lettuce leaves with mayonnaise or cooked 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.

The picture is an illustration, not a photo of this recipe · Contact us to use it

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Walnut + lettucetop 3% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together491 recipes

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

  2. Celery + lettucetop 3% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together2,033 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  3. Celery + walnuttop 4% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together851 recipes

    Shared aroma: sabinene (woody, terpenic).

  4. Celery + appletop 6% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together1,133 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methoxy-4-vinylphenol (clove, smoky).

  5. Apple + lettucetop 9% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together512 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

Celery
Adds crisp texture and a fresh, mildly savory crunch to the salad.
Apples
Provides crisp texture and a sweet-tart juiciness that balances the richer dressing.
English walnuts
Add a toasty, slightly bitter flavor and a firm crunch against the soft apple.
Mayonnaise or cooked dressing
Adds fat and creaminess, coating the pieces and carrying flavor through the salad.

Flavor stand-ins for the apple

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

  1. Avocadobetter flavor fit
  2. Limebetter flavor fit
  3. Lemonbetter flavor fit
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against celery, walnut, lettuce. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).

“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 waldorf salad recipes

Turkey 3 See all 105 →

You might also like

Illustration of Cream of Celery SoupIllustrationCream of Celery Soup113 recipesIllustration of Apple SoupIllustrationApple Soup33 recipesIllustration of Celery StewIllustrationCelery Stew25 recipesIllustration of Celery CroquettesIllustrationCelery Croquettes16 recipes