Why it works: Cream cheese and lettuce work together. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 213 recipes. Both carry nonanal, which smells fat, citrus. The science ↓
How to Serve Cheese Salad
Ingredients
Directions
Mix cream cheese with a small amount of green coloring paste.
Roll the cheese into balls the size of bird eggs using the back of a butter pat.
Wet fresh young lettuce leaves with French dressing.
Arrange the lettuce leaves on a flat plate in small groups to resemble nests.
Place a few cheese balls into each nest and serve one to each guest.
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.
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Cream cheese + lettucetop 21% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together213 recipes
Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
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