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Snack

Peanut Cheese Balls

A snack of peanut butter and cream cheese formed into small balls.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Peanut Cheese Balls

Ingredients

Directions

Make the mixture

  1. Mix equal parts of peanut butter and cream cheese in a bowl.

  2. Add a few grains of salt and moisten with sweet cream if necessary.

Shape and serve

  1. Shape the mixture into small balls.

  2. Serve the balls with salad.

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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  2. Butter + cream cheesetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,747 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Cream cheese + creamtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,087 recipes

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

  4. Peanut + cream cheesetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together163 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  5. Peanut + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,754 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

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

What each ingredient does

Peanut butter
Provides fat and rich nutty flavour that gives the balls their body.
Cream cheese
Adds creaminess and moisture, helping the mixture hold together when shaped.
Sweet cream
Adds moisture to loosen the mixture so it can be shaped into balls.

The step that matters

Moistening with sweet cream. Adding too much cream makes the mixture soft and sticky, so it will not hold its shape. Add it only as needed, a little at a time, until the mixture is firm enough to roll.

Swap the peanut

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

  1. Pecansfits better
  2. Almondfits better
  3. Walnutfits better
  4. Peanutthe original

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