Name: Cheese Ball Salad
Ingredients: cream cheese; chives (a very little); finely chopped English walnuts; butter (for rolling); lettuce leaves; French dressing

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 ↓

Cheese Ball Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Make the cheese balls

Mix a little chives with cream cheese and finely chopped English walnuts.
Roll the mixture into small balls using buttered hands.

Serve

Place the cheese balls on or under lettuce leaves.
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.

Chive + lettucetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together261 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Walnut + lettucetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together491 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).
Cream cheese + buttertop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,747 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).
Chive + walnuttop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together119 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).
Cream cheese + walnuttop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together439 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

Cream cheese: Forms the soft, creamy base that holds the balls together.
English walnuts: Add crunch and a nutty flavour contrasting the creamy cheese.
Chives: Add a mild onion-like aroma to the cheese mixture.

Swap the lettuce

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

Shallotfits about as well
Lettucethe original
Welsh onionfits about as well
Cucumberfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against cream cheese, chive, walnut, butter. 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.