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Salad

Fear and Cheese Salad

A salad of canned pears topped with whipped cream, pecans, Neufchatel cheese wreaths, and served with salad dressing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Pear and lettuce share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Fear and Cheese Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pears

  1. Drain the syrup from the pears and dry them with a towel.

  2. Place each half pear on a lettuce leaf.

Make the filling

  1. Mix the whipped cream and salad dressing, then add half the chopped pecans.

  2. Fill the centers of the pears with the cream mixture and top each with a pecan.

Garnish and serve

  1. Press the Neufchatel cheese through a vegetable press to form a wreath around each pear.

  2. Serve the remaining salad dressing in a bowl alongside the salad.

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. Pear + lettucetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together92 recipes

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

  2. Pecans + lettucetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together145 recipes

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

  3. Pear + cheesetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together96 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl pentanoate (yeast, fruit).

  4. Pear + pecanstop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  5. Cream + cheesetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,655 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Pears
Provide a sweet, juicy fruit base that contrasts with the rich dressing and cheese.
Neufchatel cheese
Adds a creamy, tangy richness and a fat-based texture to the salad.
Whipped cream
Adds airy lightness and fat, softening the texture of the filling.
Boiled salad dressing
Adds tangy, sweet flavor and moisture that binds the filling together.
Pecans
Add crunch and a toasty, nutty flavor against the soft fruit and cream.

The step that matters

Drain and dry the pears. Excess syrup and surface moisture dilute the cream filling and make it runny, so the pears should be drained and patted dry before filling.

Swap the pecans

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

  1. Walnutfits better
  2. Beansfits better
  3. Hazelnutfits better
  4. Pecansthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pear, cream, cheese, 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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