Why it works: Cream cheese and lettuce work together. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 213 recipes. Both carry nonanal, which smells fat, citrus. The science ↓
Cheese and Pimento Salad
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare
Break up the cream cheeses with a fork.
Grind the pimentos through a fine meat chopper.
Make the filling
Mix the pimentos thoroughly with the cheese, adding a little juice from the pimento can.
Beat the mixture into a light, creamy mass.
Serve
Heap the mixture on lettuce and surround with mayonnaise dressing.
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.
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Cream cheese + lettucetop 21% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together213 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
- Cream cheeses
- Provides the creamy body and rich, mild flavour that holds the salad together.
- Pimentos
- Add sweet, mild flavour and a bright red colour to the cheese.
- Mayonnaise dressing
- Adds fat and tang, moistening the salad and contrasting with the cheese.
The step that matters
Beat the mixture into a light, creamy mass. Cream cheese becomes smooth and spreadable when beaten, so stopping early can leave lumps. Beating too long can make it loosen and become runny, so it is worth checking the texture as you go.
“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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