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Cheese and Nut Roast

A baked cheese and walnut mixture with breadcrumbs, onion, butter, lemon, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Cheese and Nut Roast

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the onion

  1. Cook the onion in the butter with a little water until tender.

Mix and moisten

  1. Mix the cheese, walnuts, bread crumbs, lemon juice, salt, and pepper.

  2. Moisten the mixture with the water from cooking the onion.

Bake

  1. Pour into a shallow dish.

  2. Brown in the oven at 400°F (200°C).

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Cheese + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,130 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  4. Cheese + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,962 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  5. Walnut + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,149 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Cheese
Adds richness, savory flavor, and helps bind the roast together as it melts.
English walnuts
Provide body and a firm, chewy texture that gives the roast its substance.
Bread crumbs
Absorb moisture and give the mixture structure so it holds its shape.
Butter
Cooks the onion gently and adds fat for flavor and tenderness.

The step that matters

Moistening the mixture. Too little liquid leaves the bread crumbs dry and the roast crumbly, while too much makes it soggy and slow to set. Add the onion water gradually so the crumbs absorb it evenly and the mixture holds together when shaped and baked.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cheese, walnut, bread, butter, lemon, pepper):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Spinachfits better
  3. Asparagusfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cheese, walnut, bread, butter, lemon, pepper. 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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