Cottage cheese is a nutritious and healthy food, and I’m always looking for new ways to eat it, so was intrigued when I came across a hundred-year-old recipe for Chives and Cottage Cheese Salad. The salad included cottage cheese, a bit of mayonnaise, chives, parsley and pimiento. The ingredients worked well together, and the salad was very tasty.
A unique feature of the Chives and Cottage Cheese salad was that the mixture was supposed to be shaped into marble-sized balls, and served on lettuce. This gave the salad a very old-fashioned look, though I was a little disappointed that the balls were very moist and didn’t stay together very well.
The verdict: The salad was lovely, but if I made it again, I just put it into a dish and skip shaping it into balls.
Here’s the original recipe:
Here’s the recipe updated for modern cooks:
Chives and Cottage Cheese Salad
1/2 pound (1 cup) cottage cheese
2 tablespoons mayonnaise
1/2 tablespoon chives, finely chopped (Green pepper may be substituted for the chives.) – I used chives.
2 sprigs parsley, finely chopped
1 tablespoon pimiento, finely chopped
lettuce
Put cottage cheese and mayonnaise into a bowl; stir to combine. Add chives, parsley, and pimiento; stir until evenly distributed throughout the cottage cheese mixture. Shape into balls the size of large marbles, and put on a plate covered with lettuce leaves.
A blast from the past! A childhood lunch …
Nice to hear that this brought back some food memories.
Definitely a blast from the past for me too I was only thinking about adding chives the other day to my plain cottage cheese sometimes my mother served it with prawns but that was a treat…
Prawns with it would be a lovely treat.
I think Sparky would love this! Perfect on a hot summer evening as a prelude to a cooler supper!
I think that he’d like it. It is a nice summer food.
I love cottage cheese and chives, so I know this would be right up my alley!
Good to hear this this is right up your alley.
My grandmother used to mix in some drained crushed pineapple and lots of chives, no mayo or anything else. My mother would sprinkle a bit of grated parmesan cheese on top.
Thanks for the suggestions for some other ingredients that might be added. I can’t quite picture this with crushed pineapple, but I want to try it.
Picture it with cottage cheese, lime jello, crushed pineapple, and chopped pecans, circa 1950s and 60s!
It was kind of like the salad with pineapple, coconut, marsh mellows and maraschino cherries but not as sweet since it wasn’t mixed with whipped topping or sweetened whipped cream.
Cottage cheese and chives sounds mighty tasty.
It’s yummy.
Modern industrially produced cottage cheese has firm curds in a runny whey and is filled with stabilizers. Home made traditional cottage cheese is more homogeneous in texture, less wet and is easy to form into balls. It’s also very easy to make, you should try it!
Your comment is very helpful and gives me a lot of insight into why the cottage cheese balls that I made were so moist. I didn’t think about how cottage cheese was quite different a hundred years ago than what commercial cottage cheese is today. I know that I have seen recipes in old cookbooks for making cottage cheese, and now want to try making one of them.