Name: Cheese Balls for Salad
Ingredients: 8 ounces cream cheese; 4 English walnuts; ¼ cup chopped pimentos

Why it works: Cream cheese and walnut work together. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 439 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

Cheese Balls for Salad

Ingredients

8 ounces cream cheese
4 English walnuts
¼ cup chopped pimentos

Directions

Roll the cream cheese into small balls.
Press half an English walnut into the center of each ball.
Cover the balls with chopped pimentos.

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 + walnuttop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together439 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Cream cheese: Forms the soft, creamy base that holds the shape of each cheese ball.
English walnuts: Add a firm, crunchy contrast to the soft cheese.
Pimentos: Add mild sweetness and color to the outside of the balls.

“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.