Name: Cottage Cheese Salad
Ingredients: cottage cheese; lettuce leaves; salad dressing; salted wafers

Why it works: Cottage cheese and lettuce work together. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 85 recipes. Both carry nonanal, which smells fat, citrus. The science ↓

Cottage Cheese Salad

Ingredients

cottage cheese
lettuce leaves
salad dressing
salted wafers

Directions

Place small balls of cottage cheese on lettuce leaves.
Pour about 1 tablespoon of salad dressing over each ball.
Serve with salted wafers.

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.

Cottage cheese + lettucetop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together85 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Cottage cheese: Provides the creamy, mild base of each salad portion.
Salad dressing: Adds moisture and tangy flavour that balances the mild cheese.
Lettuce leaves: Offers a cool, crisp base that holds the cheese and dressing.

“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.