Name: Spanish Salad
Ingredients: 8 ounces cream cheese, cut into ½-inch cubes; 4 ounces Spanish pimentoes, cut into ½-inch squares; Lettuce leaves; Mayonnaise

Why it works: Cream cheese and lettuce work together. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 213 recipes. Both carry nonanal, which smells fat, citrus. The science ↓

Spanish Salad

Ingredients

8 ounces cream cheese, cut into ½-inch cubes
4 ounces Spanish pimentoes, cut into ½-inch squares
Lettuce leaves
Mayonnaise

Directions

Combine the cream cheese cubes and Spanish pimento squares in a bowl, using twice as many cheese cubes as pimento squares.
Serve the mixture on a bed of lettuce leaves.
Drizzle generously with mayonnaise.

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.

Cream cheese + lettucetop 21% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together213 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

Cream cheese: Provides soft, creamy body and a mild, rich base for the salad.
Spanish pimentoes: Adds sweet, mild pepper flavour and a bit of colour to the salad.
Mayonnaise: Adds fat and moisture, giving a smooth, rich dressing.

“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.