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Cheese Balls

Cheese balls made from cottage cheese, butter, spices, and nuts.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Cheese Balls

Why it works: Butter and cottage cheese work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 376 recipes. Both carry gamma-decalactone, which smells peach, creamy. The science ↓

Cheese Balls

Ingredients

Directions

Make the cheese mixture

  1. Add melted butter to dry cottage cheese and rub until smooth.

  2. Stir in salt, paprika, and black pepper.

Shape and serve

  1. Form mixture into balls the size of English walnuts.

  2. Roll balls in finely chopped nuts and set aside to cool.

  3. Serve as a cheese course with lettuce and crackers.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Butter + cottage cheesetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together376 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-decalactone (peach, creamy).

  2. Butter + nutstop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,291 recipes

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

  3. Cottage cheese + nutstop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25 recipes

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

  4. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  5. Cottage cheese + peppertop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together393 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl 2-methylbutyrate (fruity, apple).

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

What each ingredient does

Dry cottage cheese
Forms the main body of the balls, giving a soft, spreadable-then-firm texture.
Melted butter
Adds fat and richness, making the cheese smooth and easier to shape.

The step that matters

Rubbing the butter into the cheese until smooth. Cottage cheese is curdy and dry, so it must be worked until the butter is evenly blended. Uneven mixing leaves lumps and crumbly patches that won't hold together when shaped into balls.

Swap the nuts

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, cottage cheese, pepper):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, cottage cheese, pepper. 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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