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Strawberry Salad

A salad of lettuce topped with strawberries, powdered sugar, mayonnaise dressing, and served with Neufchatel or Philadelphia cream cheese.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Lettuce and cream cheese 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 ↓

Strawberry Salad

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Arrange the lettuce leaves on a plate.

  2. Heap the halved strawberries in the center.

  3. Sprinkle with powdered sugar.

  4. Add 2 teaspoons of mayonnaise dressing on each portion.

  5. Serve with Neufchatel or Philadelphia cream cheese.

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. Lettuce + cream cheesetop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together213 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  2. Sugar + cream cheesetop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,791 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  3. Lettuce + sugartop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,486 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

What each ingredient does

Strawberries
Provide the main sweetness, fresh flavor and juice for the salad.
Powdered sugar
Adds sweetness and dissolves into the strawberry juices.
Mayonnaise dressing
Adds fat and tang, giving the dressing a creamy texture.
Neufchatel or philadelphia cream cheese
Adds creaminess, fat and a mild tang to the dish.
Lettuce
Forms a crisp, cool base that holds the other ingredients.

Swap the lettuce

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

  1. Chivefits better
  2. Cucumberfits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Lettucethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, cream cheese. 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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