Name: Lettuce Salad with Cheese Balls
Ingredients: 1 cream cheese; thick sweet cream; parsley; chives; sweet red pepper or spiced beets; 1 hard-boiled egg yolk; pecan nuts; lettuce leaves

Why it works: Chive and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 261 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Lettuce Salad with Cheese Balls

Ingredients

Directions

Work the cream cheese smooth with a fork, adding enough thick sweet cream to make a stiff paste.
Divide the mixture into three or more portions.
Color one portion green with a paste of parsley and chives.
Color another portion red with pounded sweet red pepper or finely chopped spiced beets.
Color a third portion yellow with crushed yolk of a hard-boiled egg.
Color a fourth portion brown with pounded pecan nuts.
Mould the colored mixtures into tiny balls.
Arrange one or more balls of each color in nests made with lettuce leaves.

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.

Chive + lettucetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together261 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together34,122 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Parsley + chivetop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,150 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Parsley + lettucetop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,483 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).
Pepper + lettucetop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,037 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

Swap the nuts

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cream cheese, cream, parsley, chive, pepper, egg, lettuce):

Walnutfits better
Beansfits better
Chestnutfits better
Nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cream cheese, cream, parsley, chive, pepper, egg, lettuce. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.