Name: Nut Salad
Ingredients: 1 cup chopped English walnuts or other walnut meats; 2 cups fine tender lettuce leaves, shredded; French dressing or any good dressing

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 ↓

Nut Salad

Ingredients

1 cup chopped English walnuts or other walnut meats
2 cups fine tender lettuce leaves, shredded
French dressing or any good dressing

Directions

Prepare

Chop the English walnuts or other walnut meats.
Shred the tender lettuce leaves.

Serve

Serve the walnuts and lettuce on additional lettuce leaves.
Drizzle with French dressing or your choice of 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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · 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 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).

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

What each ingredient does

Walnuts: Add crunch and a rich, slightly bitter nutty flavour against the mild lettuce.
Lettuce leaves: Provide the crisp, moist base that holds the walnuts and dressing.
French dressing: Adds moisture, acidity and sweetness that coats the leaves and walnuts.

“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.