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Salad

Sweet Bed Peppers and Lettuce Salad

A salad of lettuce and sweet peppers served with cottage or pimiento cheese.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Cottage cheese and cheese match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 126 recipes. Both carry ethyl 2-methylbutyrate, which smells fruity, apple. The science ↓

Sweet Bed Peppers and Lettuce Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Wash and dry the small leaves of head lettuce.

  2. Cut the bright-red sweet pepper into strips.

Make the cheese

  1. For cottage cheese, heat fresh clabber slowly until just hot enough to separate the curd from the whey.

  2. Pour the curd into a thin cloth bag and let it drip for 1-2 hours.

  3. Transfer the curd to a bowl, season with salt and pepper, and mix in ½ cup cream.

  4. For pimiento cheese, finely chop the baked and peeled pimientos.

  5. Cream the pimientos and curd together until smooth.

Serve

  1. Serve the salad with a small cheese ball on each plate.

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. Cottage cheese + cheesetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together126 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl 2-methylbutyrate (fruity, apple).

  2. Lettuce + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,037 recipes

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

  3. Cream + cheesetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  4. Cottage cheese + creamtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together146 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-decalactone (peach, creamy).

  5. Lettuce + cottage cheesetop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Cottage cheese curd
Forms the creamy base of the cheese ball and gives the salad its mild, fresh flavour.
Cream
Adds moisture and richness, softening the curd into a smoother, spreadable texture.
Pimientos
Add sweet, mild pepper flavour and colour to the pimiento cheese.

The step that matters

Heating the clabber. Heating slowly lets the curd separate cleanly from the whey. Heating too fast can make the curd tough and grainy, and it may not drain well.

Swap the lettuce

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

  1. Spinachfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Tomatofits better
  4. Lettucethe original

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

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