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Dessert

Cream-Cheese

Cream cheese made by draining curds from milk, drying, and ripening with strawberry leaves.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and strawberry are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,130 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Cream-Cheese

Ingredients

Directions

Curdle and drain

  1. Put one large spoonful of curds into 5 quarts of milk.

  2. Break the curds down lightly.

  3. Place the mixture on a cloth in a sieve.

  4. Let it drain until dry.

Shape and salt

  1. Break the curds.

  2. Cut the curds.

  3. Turn the curds in a clean cloth.

  4. Return the curds to the sieve.

  5. Place a 2-pound weight on top.

  6. Sprinkle a little coarse sea salt.

  7. Let it stand overnight.

Dry and ripen

  1. Lay the curds on a board to dry.

  2. When dry, place a few strawberry leaves on the curds.

  3. Ripen the curds between two plates in a warm place.

  4. Turn the curds.

  5. Add fresh leaves daily.

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 + strawberrytop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,130 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Milk
Provides the proteins that coagulate into the curds.
Steep
Starts the milk coagulating so it separates into curds and whey.

The step that matters

Draining under the weight. Whey must drain out while the curds are still soft. Too little draining leaves the cheese wet and prone to spoiling, while too much drying makes it hard and crumbly.

“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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