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Salad

Lettuce Salad Witpi Cheese Balls

A lettuce salad served with small cheese balls colored with parsley, chives, red pepper or beet, egg yolk, and pecan.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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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 ↓

Lettuce Salad Witpi Cheese Balls

Ingredients

Directions

Make the cheese paste

  1. In a bowl, work the cream cheese smooth with a fork.

  2. Gradually add enough thick sweet cream to make a stiff paste.

  3. Divide the mixture into four portions.

Color and shape

  1. Color one portion green with a paste of parsley and chives.

  2. Color another portion red with pounded sweet red pepper or finely chopped spiced beets.

  3. Color a third portion yellow with crushed hard boiled egg yolk.

  4. Color the fourth portion brown with pounded pecan nuts.

  5. Mold each colored portion into tiny balls.

Serve

  1. Arrange one or more balls of each color in nests made with lettuce leaves.

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. Chive + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together261 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Parsley + chivetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Parsley + lettucetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,483 recipes

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

  5. Pepper + lettucetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Cream cheese
Forms the smooth, creamy base that holds the balls together.
Thick sweet cream
Adds moisture and softness so the cheese becomes a stiff, moldable paste.
Hard boiled egg yolk
Gives the yellow portion its color and a rich, crumbly texture.
Pecan nuts
Provide the brown color and a toasty, nutty flavor.
Sweet red pepper or spiced beets
Supply the red color and a mild sweetness or earthiness.

The step that matters

Gradually add enough thick sweet cream to make a stiff paste. Adding cream slowly lets you judge the texture. Too much cream makes the paste soft and hard to mold, while too little leaves it crumbly and unable to hold a ball shape.

Swap the nuts

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

  1. Walnutfits better
  2. Beansfits better
  3. Chestnutfits better
  4. Nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cream cheese, cream, parsley, chive, pepper, egg, 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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