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Frozen Cheese Salad

A chilled cheese mixture served on lettuce with French dressing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

Frozen Cheese Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cheese

  1. In a bowl, moisten the cream cheese with a little cream.

  2. Add paprika, coarse sea salt, and chopped parsley, then mix well.

  3. Pack the mixture into individual molds.

Freeze

  1. Place the molds in a covered tin dish.

  2. Pack the molds with ice and salt for 3 hours.

Serve

  1. Serve each mold on a white lettuce leaf 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. Cream cheese + creamtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,087 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-decalactone (peach, creamy).

  3. Cream cheese + lettucetop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together213 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  4. Cream + lettucetop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,121 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

  5. Cream cheese + parsleytop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together292 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

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

What each ingredient does

Cream cheese
Forms the main body of the salad and, once chilled, sets firm enough to hold a mold shape.
Cream
Moistens the cream cheese so it packs smoothly into molds and stays creamy after freezing.
Parsley
Adds fresh herbal aroma and a little green flavour to the mild cheese.

The step that matters

Packing the molds with ice and salt. Salt lowers the melting point of the ice, so the brine becomes colder than plain ice and freezes the cheese. The molds need to be fully surrounded so the cheese chills evenly and sets firm.

Swap the parsley

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

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Parsleythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cream cheese, 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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