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Salad

Colored Cheese Ball Salad

A salad of small cheese balls made with cream cheese, sweet cream, egg yolk, parsley, pecans, and chives, served with French dressing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and chive match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,150 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Colored Cheese Ball Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cheese

  1. Mix the cream into the cheese with a fork to make a stiff paste.

  2. Divide the mixture into 4 portions.

Flavour the portions

  1. To one portion, add chopped parsley and chives.

  2. To another, add red pepper or chopped beets.

  3. To the third, add the yolk of the hard-boiled egg.

  4. To the fourth, add pounded pecan nuts.

Shape and serve

  1. Mold into tiny balls and place one or more of each in nests made with lettuce leaves.

  2. Cover with French dressing.

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Cream cheese + pecanstop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together465 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  3. Cream cheese + chivetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together204 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  4. Cream cheese + creamtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,087 recipes

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

  5. Egg + pecanstop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,280 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Cream cheese
Forms the stiff paste that holds the balls together and gives them a rich body.
Sweet cream
Softens the cheese and adds moisture and richness to the paste.
Hard-boiled egg yolk
Adds a soft, rich flavour and a crumbly texture to one portion.
Pecans
Add crunch and a nutty flavour when pounded into one portion.

The step that matters

Mix the cream into the cheese to a stiff paste. The paste must be stiff enough to hold its shape when moulded into balls. Too much cream makes it soft and slack, so the balls will not keep their form.

Swap the parsley

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

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Tarragonfits better
  4. Parsleythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cream cheese, cream, egg, pecans, chive. 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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