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Salad

Special Pineapple Salad

A salad of pineapple slices topped with cream cheese balls, mayonnaise, nuts, and maraschino cherries.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Pineapple and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 271 recipes. Both carry nonanal, which smells fat, citrus. The science ↓

Special Pineapple Salad

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Place a slice of Hawaiian pineapple on a crisp lettuce leaf for each serving.

  2. Shape cream cheese into small balls and dust each with paprika.

  3. Place three cream cheese balls on each pineapple slice.

  4. Heap the center of the pineapple with mayonnaise.

  5. Sprinkle the top with chopped nuts and garnish with a maraschino cherry.

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. Pineapple + lettucetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together271 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  2. Lettuce + nutstop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together174 recipes

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

  3. Pineapple + cream cheesetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together250 recipes

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

  4. Pineapple + nutstop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together162 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  5. 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
Forms the creamy, mild base of the salad's filling and balls.
Mayonnaise
Adds richness and moisture to the heaped center of the pineapple.
Pineapple
Provides sweetness and juice that contrasts with the rich cream cheese.

Swap the nuts

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

  1. Walnutfits better
  2. Beansfits better
  3. Macadamia nutfits better
  4. Nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pineapple, lettuce, cream cheese. 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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