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Dessert

Cheese Cake

A baked cheesecake made with sweet and sour milk, sugar, lemon, egg yolks, and puff pastry lining.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,053 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Cheese Cake

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the curds

  1. Combine sweet milk and sour milk in a double boiler and cook until it curdles.

  2. Strain the curds through a sieve.

Make the filling

  1. Beat sugar and egg yolks together in a bowl.

  2. Add the lemon rind, lemon juice, and strained curds to the bowl and mix.

Bake and cool

  1. Line patty pans with thinly rolled puff pastry.

  2. Spoon the mixture into each lined pan.

  3. Bake for 15 to 20 minutes.

  4. Allow to cool in the pans before removing.

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 + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

  2. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  3. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

  4. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

  5. Lemon + eggtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Sour milk
Curdles when heated, forming the tender, tangy curds that give the filling its body.
Egg yolks
Add richness and help the filling set as it bakes.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and helps balance the tang of the curds and lemon.
Lemon
Rind and juice add aroma and bright acidity to the filling.

The step that matters

Cooking the milks until they curdle. Heat must be gentle enough in the double boiler to separate curds without scorching the milk. Overheating can make the curds grainy or tough, so the curds should be strained once they have clearly separated.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits about as well
  3. Raisinfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, sugar, 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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Lemon 96Almond 47Rice 25Apple 21Curd 14Orange 14 See all 71 →

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