Name: Nut and Cheese Loaf
Ingredients: 2 large squares of Philadelphia cream cheese; chopped fruits; chopped nuts; ground nuts for rolling

Why it works: Cream cheese and nuts work together. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 56 recipes. Both carry 2-nonanone, which smells fruity, floral. The science ↓

Nut and Cheese Loaf

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

2 large squares of Philadelphia cream cheese
chopped fruits
chopped nuts
ground nuts for rolling

Directions

Prepare

Chop the fruits and nuts.
Mix the chopped fruits and nuts with the cream cheese.
Mould the mixture into a loaf shape.
Roll the loaf in ground nuts.

Serve

Cut into slices.
Serve with 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.

Cream cheese + nutstop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together56 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Cream cheese: Gives the loaf a creamy, soft body that holds the chopped pieces together.
Chopped fruits: Add moisture and natural sweetness to the creamy cheese.
Chopped nuts: Add crunch and texture throughout the soft cheese.

“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.