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Salad

Cream Cheese, Ball Salad

A salad of cream cheese balls with pepper, pimento, cayenne, tarragon vinegar, mayonnaise, apple, celery, and lettuce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Tarragon and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 425 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Cream Cheese, Ball Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pepper

  1. Remove the core and seeds from the green pepper.

  2. Cover it with boiling water and parboil for 15 minutes.

  3. Chop the parboiled pepper finely with a little pimento.

Make the cheese fingers

  1. In a bowl, work the cream cheese until creamy.

  2. Mix in the chopped peppers, cayenne, and tarragon vinegar.

  3. Shape the mixture into fingers about 1 inch thick.

  4. Place them on ice to harden.

Assemble the salad

  1. Shred the celery and the unpeeled apple, then mix with the mayonnaise.

  2. Arrange the mixture in a mound in the center of a dish lined with lettuce leaves.

  3. Cut the cheese fingers into rounds and fill the border of lettuce leaves with them.

  4. Top each round of cheese with a dot of mayonnaise.

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. Tarragon + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together425 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Tarragon + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together456 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Lettuce + celerytop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,033 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  4. Pepper + celerytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  5. Pepper + tarragontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,399 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

What each ingredient does

Cream cheese
Provides the creamy, firm body that holds the shaped fingers together.
Mayonnaise
Adds fat and moisture, binding the shredded salad and finishing each round.
Tarragon vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the rich cream cheese.
Tart red apple
Contributes crisp texture and tart flavor to the shredded mixture.

The step that matters

Chilling the cheese fingers on ice. Cream cheese is soft at room temperature, so it must firm up fully before shaping is finished and cutting. Chilling sets its fat so the rounds keep clean edges instead of smearing.

Swap the apple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, cream cheese, tarragon, vinegar, lettuce, celery):

  1. Limefits better
  2. Lemonfits better
  3. Avocadofits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, cream cheese, tarragon, vinegar, lettuce, celery. 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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