Skip to main content
Salad

Stuffed Celery Salad

A salad of celery pieces stuffed with Neufchâtel cheese mixture, served on lettuce leaves with stuffed olives.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Celery and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,033 recipes. Both carry nonanal, which smells fat, citrus. The science ↓

Stuffed Celery Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Make the filling

  1. In a bowl, mix Neufchâtel cheese with cream, salt, and pepper until smooth.

  2. Add the finely chopped green pepper to the cheese mixture and combine well.

Stuff and serve

  1. Remove the strings from the celery and cut it into 1‑inch pieces.

  2. Stuff the celery pieces with the cheese mixture.

  3. Serve the stuffed celery on lettuce leaves with stuffed olives on the side.

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

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  2. Pepper + celerytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Olive + lettucetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,580 recipes

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

  4. Pepper + lettucetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,037 recipes

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

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Neufchâtel cheese
Forms the creamy base of the filling, giving it body and a mild tang.
Cream
Loosens the cheese so the filling becomes smooth and easy to spoon.
Green pepper
Adds crisp texture and fresh, slightly bitter flavor to the filling.
Celery
Serves as the crisp, watery edible vessel holding the filling.

The step that matters

Mixing the cheese with the cream until smooth. Cold, stiff cheese left in lumps will not blend evenly and can make the filling hard to spread into the celery. Softening the cheese first and mixing gradually gives a uniform, smooth texture.

Swap the lettuce

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

  1. Tomatofits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Mustardfits better
  4. Lettucethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cheese, cream, pepper, celery, olive. 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.

You might also like

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