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Salad

Cheese and Olive Salad

A salad of cream cheese and olives rolled in walnuts, served on lettuce with French dressing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Walnut and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 491 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Cheese and Olive Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Make the cheese balls

  1. In a bowl, mix the cream cheese and chopped olives until well combined.

  2. Form the mixture into small balls.

  3. Roll each ball in the finely chopped walnuts.

Serve

  1. Serve the cheese and olive balls on a bed of finely shredded lettuce.

  2. Drizzle with French dressing before serving.

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. Walnut + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together491 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 + walnuttop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,087 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Cream cheese + walnuttop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together439 recipes

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

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Cream cheese
Provides a soft, creamy base that binds the olives and holds the balls together.
Stuffed olives
Add salty, briny flavour and a bit of moisture to the cheese mixture.
English walnuts
Add a crunchy, nutty coating that contrasts with the creamy centre.

Swap the lettuce

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

  1. Lettucethe original
  2. Cucumberfits about as well
  3. Capsicumfits less well
  4. Chivefits less well

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