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Cooked Cheese — for Lunch or Tea

A simple melted cheese sauce made with milk, cheese, butter, salt, pepper, and thickened with cracker dust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Cooked Cheese — for Lunch or Tea

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Heat the milk in a saucepan until it reaches a boiling point.

  2. Add the grated cheese, butter, salt, and pepper to the boiling milk.

  3. Thicken the mixture with cracker dust and remove from heat.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

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

  3. Milk + cheesetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,426 recipes

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

  4. Cheese + peppertop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,861 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Milk
Forms the liquid base that the cheese melts into and the sauce is built on.
Grated cheese
Melts into the hot milk to give the sauce its flavour and rich body.
Butter
Adds fat for smoothness and a silkier mouthfeel in the finished sauce.
Cracker dust
Absorbs liquid and swells, thickening the sauce to a coating consistency.

The step that matters

Thicken the mixture with cracker dust and remove from heat. Cracker dust thickens quickly once added, so it should be stirred in gradually and the sauce removed from heat as soon as it reaches the desired consistency. Adding too much or overcooking can leave the sauce stiff, grainy, or pasty.

“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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