Skip to main content
Salad

Cheese Salad

A salad of Neufchatel cheese balls rolled in parsley, served on lettuce with olives and French dressing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Cheese Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cheese

  1. Mash the Neufchatel cheese in a bowl.

  2. Moisten the cheese with a little milk.

  3. Form the mixture into balls the size of robin's eggs.

  4. Roll the cheese balls in finely chopped parsley.

Serve

  1. Arrange the balls on lettuce leaves.

  2. Garnish with olives and serve with French dressing.

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. Lettuce + olivetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,580 recipes

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

  3. Parsley + olivetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,649 recipes

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

  4. Cheese + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,426 recipes

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

  5. Cheese + olivetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,802 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

Neufchatel cheese
Forms the body of the salad, shaped into balls that hold together.
Milk
Adds moisture so the mashed cheese becomes soft and easy to shape.
Finely chopped parsley
Coats the outside of the balls, adding color and a fresh herbal aroma.

Swap the parsley

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against cheese, milk, lettuce, 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.

You might also like

Chicken SaladChicken Salad623 recipesSalad DressingSalad Dressing491 recipesTomato SaladTomato Salad179 recipesCold SlawCold Slaw160 recipes