Name: Apple and Nut Salad
Ingredients: 4 juicy apples; ½ cup seeded raisins; ¼ lb English or black walnuts; whipped cream; lemon; lettuce leaves

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 ↓

Apple and Nut Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

Chop the apples and walnuts into bite-sized pieces.
In a bowl, combine the chopped apples, raisins, and walnuts.

Serve

Serve the mixture on a lettuce leaf.
Top with whipped cream and a squeeze of lemon.

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.

Walnut + lettucetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together491 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).
Lemon + lettucetop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,559 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).
Walnut + lemontop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,149 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Raisin + walnuttop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together647 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).
Apple + raisintop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,920 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

What each ingredient does

Apples: Provide crisp texture and natural sweetness with a tart edge.
Walnuts: Add crunch and a rich, slightly bitter nutty flavor.
Raisins: Add concentrated sweetness and chewy texture.
Whipped cream: Adds richness and a soft, creamy texture to the salad.
Lemon: Adds acidity that brightens the flavor and slows browning of cut apples.

Swap the apple

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

Limefits better
Figfits better
Avocadofits better
Applethe original

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