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Dessert

Cheese Cake S.

A cheese cake made with milk curd, butter, egg yolks, rosewater, nutmeg, currants, and a flour crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 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 Cake S.

Ingredients

Directions

Make the curd

  1. Heat the milk and add rennet; once curdled, tie it in a cloth to drain the whey.

  2. In a bowl, rub the butter with the curd through a fine sieve.

Make the filling

  1. Add the egg yolks, rosewater, nutmeg, sugar, and currants; mix well.

Make the crust and bake

  1. For the crust, combine flour, sugar, egg yolks, sack, and enough butter to form a paste.

  2. Roll the crust thin and use it to line a baking dish.

  3. Pour the cheese mixture into the crust and bake until set.

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. Nutmeg + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Currant + sherrytop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together393 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + sherrytop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,505 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

Butter and flour 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

Milk
Forms the curd, which becomes the body of the cheese filling.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, giving the curd a smoother, softer texture.
Egg yolks
Add richness and help the filling set when baked.
Fine flour
Forms the structure of the pastry crust.
Currants
Add sweetness and chewy texture within the filling.

The step that matters

Draining the curd. Curd that still holds too much whey will make the filling watery and stop it setting firmly. Draining well gives a denser, sliceable cheese.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, butter, egg, nutmeg, sugar, flour, sherry. 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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