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Cottage Cheese Salad

A chilled cottage cheese mixture layered with pimento strips, served on lettuce with French dressing and wafers.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,483 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Cottage Cheese Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mold

  1. Fill a rectangular tin mold with cold water to chill and wet the surface, then line the bottom with waxed paper.

Make and chill the cheese

  1. Mix the cottage cheese, cream, chopped parsley, and salt in a bowl until well combined.

  2. Pack the cheese mixture into the mold in three layers, adding pimento strips between the layers.

  3. Cover the mold with waxed paper and place it in a cool place until ready to serve.

Unmold and serve

  1. Run a knife around the sides of the mold and invert it onto a serving plate.

  2. Cut into slices and serve on lettuce leaves with French dressing and wafers or thin sandwiches.

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 + lettucetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,483 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  2. Cottage cheese + breadtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together72 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity, apple peel).

  3. Lettuce + breadtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together602 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  4. Parsley + breadtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,588 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Cottage cheese + creamtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together146 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Cottage cheese
Forms the body of the salad, setting into a firm, sliceable block when packed and chilled.
Cream
Adds richness and a smoother, softer texture to the cheese mixture.
Pimento strips
Add colour and mild sweetness in visible layers through the sliced cheese.

The step that matters

Packing the cheese in three layers. Pressing the mixture firmly into the chilled, wet mold and keeping it cool lets the cheese set and hold its shape, so the block unmolds cleanly and slices without crumbling.

Swap the parsley

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

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Celeryfits better
  3. Capersfits about as well
  4. Parsleythe original

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