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Dessert

Cheese Pie

A baked cheese pie with flour, milk, sugar, currants, citron, lemon, eggs, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

Cheese Pie

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Grate the cheese.

  2. In a bowl, mix the sugar with the flour.

  3. Add the melted butter, lemon rind, and juice.

Make the filling

  1. Add the slightly beaten eggs, milk, and chopped fruit.

Bake

  1. Fill a pastry-lined tin with the mixture.

  2. Bake at 350°F (175°C) until the center is firm.

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. Cheese + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,426 recipes

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

  4. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Cheese or cottage cheese
Forms the body of the filling, giving it a rich, creamy, sliceable texture when baked.
Eggs
Set as they bake, binding the filling so it firms into a sliceable pie.
Flour
Mixes with the sugar and helps thicken the filling so it holds its shape.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps balance the tang of the cheese and lemon.
Milk
Adds moisture and softness, loosening the filling before it sets in the oven.
Lemon
Its rind and juice add aroma and a bright acidity that cuts the richness of the cheese.

The step that matters

Bake until the center is firm. The eggs set as they heat, so the center needs to firm fully. Pulling the pie too early leaves a loose, wet middle that will not slice cleanly.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cheese, flour, milk, sugar, butter, lemon, egg):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Raisinfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cheese, flour, milk, sugar, butter, lemon, egg. 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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