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Salad

Cream Cheese Salad

A salad of cream cheese and olives rolled in parsley, served on lettuce with mayonnaise.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Cream Cheese Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Make the cheese balls

  1. In a bowl, mix the chopped olives with the cream cheese.

  2. Add butter and cream as needed to achieve a smooth consistency.

  3. Form the mixture into tiny balls.

  4. Roll each ball in finely chopped parsley.

Serve

  1. Serve three or four balls on a lettuce leaf 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.

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

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

  2. Olive + lettucetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,580 recipes

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

  3. Olive + parsleytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,649 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

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

  5. Cream cheese + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,747 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

What each ingredient does

Cream cheese
Provides the creamy base that holds the olives together in a soft, spreadable mixture.
Olives
Add salty, tangy flavor and bits of texture throughout the mixture.
Butter
Adds richness and helps soften the mixture to a smooth consistency.
Cream
Loosens the mixture and adds moisture for a smoother, easier-to-shape texture.

The step that matters

Add butter and cream gradually. Cream cheese can turn stiff or grainy if too much is added at once. Adding small amounts and mixing until smooth lets the fats and liquid blend evenly, so the mixture is soft enough to shape into balls but still holds its form.

Swap the parsley

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

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Garlicfits about as well
  4. Parsleythe original

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