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Cottage Cheese

A soft fresh cheese made by scalding clabbered sour milk, draining it, and working it with cream and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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 ↓

Cottage Cheese

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Place a pan of clabbered sour milk over the fire and scald well.

  2. Pour the milk into a clean cloth and squeeze out all the water.

  3. Put the clabber into a basin and work it with your hands, moistening with a little cream and butter.

  4. Mold the mixture into little balls.

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. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  3. Milk + creamtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together29,399 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

Clabbered sour milk
Its curds form the body of the cheese once the whey is drained away.
Cream
Adds moisture and richness so the curds feel softer and smoother.
Butter
Adds fat, which softens the curds and gives a richer flavour.

The step that matters

Squeezing out the water. Any whey left in the curds will make the cheese wet and sour-tasting and hard to shape. Squeezing the cloth thoroughly gives a firmer, drier curd that holds its balls.

“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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