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Salad

Cottage-Cheese Salad

A chilled salad of cottage cheese, cream, parsley, and optional pimento strips, served on lettuce with French dressing and wafers.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,483 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Cottage-Cheese Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mold

  1. Fill a rectangular tin mold with cold water to chill and wet the surface.

  2. Line the bottom of the mold with waxed paper.

Make and chill the salad

  1. Mix the cottage cheese, cream, parsley, and salt in a bowl until well combined.

  2. Pack the cheese mixture into the mold in three layers, adding pimento strips between layers.

  3. Cover the mold with waxed paper and refrigerate until ready to serve.

Unmold and serve

  1. Run a knife around the sides of the mold.

  2. Invert the mold onto a serving plate.

  3. Cut the chilled cheese into slices.

  4. Serve the slices on lettuce leaves with French dressing and wafers.

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. Parsley + lettucetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,483 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Cottage cheese + lettucetop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  4. Cottage cheese + parsleytop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together110 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

  5. Cream + lettucetop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,121 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

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

What each ingredient does

Cottage cheese
Forms the body of the salad, giving it a soft, moldable texture when packed.
Cream
Adds moisture and richness, making the cheese mixture smoother and softer.
Parsley
Adds fresh, herbal aroma and a little color to the cheese.

The step that matters

Chilling the mold before packing. Cold water wets the mold surface so the chilled cheese releases cleanly when inverted. Chilling also firms the cottage cheese so the slices hold their shape.

Swap the parsley

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

  1. Celeryfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Dillfits better
  4. Parsleythe original

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

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