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Cream Cheese Salad with Currants

A chilled cream cheese mixture topped with red currants and served with stuffed olives and reception wafers.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Red currant and olive work together. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 114 recipes. Both carry isoamyl acetate, which smells banana, pear. The science ↓

Cream Cheese Salad with Currants

Ingredients

Directions

Make the cream cheese mixture

  1. Beat the cream cheese with a fork until light and smooth.

  2. Whip the heavy cream to stiff peaks.

  3. Gently mix the cream cheese and whipped cream together.

  4. Pile the mixture on a serving plate.

Garnish and serve

  1. Just before serving, pour the red currants over the cheese mixture.

  2. Arrange stuffed olives around the edge of the plate and serve with reception 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. Red currant + olivetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together114 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  2. Cream cheese + olivetop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,003 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl 2-methylbutyrate (apple, fatty).

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

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

  4. Cream cheese + red curranttop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  5. Cream + olivetop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,206 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

Cream cheese
Provides the rich, creamy base that forms the body of the salad.
Heavy cream
Whipped to stiff peaks, it lightens the cheese and adds a soft, airy texture.
Red currants
Add a tart, bright flavour that contrasts with the rich cheese.

The step that matters

Gently mix the cream cheese and whipped cream together. Whipped cream holds air in its fine foam structure. Overmixing or stirring vigorously deflates it and makes the mixture dense and heavy instead of light.

Swap the red currant

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

  1. Strawberryfits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Avocadofits better
  4. Red currantthe original

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