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Dessert

To Make Cream-Cheese

A homemade cheese made by curdling milk with rennet, draining, pressing, 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 ↓

To Make Cream-Cheese

Ingredients

Directions

Make the curd

  1. Dissolve the rennet in the milk.

  2. Break down the mixture lightly and pour it onto a cloth in a sieve.

  3. Let it drain until dry.

Press and dry

  1. Cut and turn the cheese in a clean cloth.

  2. Return it to the sieve, place a 2‑pound weight on top, and sprinkle with a little salt.

  3. Let it stand overnight.

  4. Lay it on a board to dry.

Ripen

  1. When dry, place strawberry leaves on it and ripen it between two pewter dishes in a warm place, turning it daily and adding fresh leaves.

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
Forms the body of the cheese once the rennet sets it into curd.
Rennet
Coagulates the milk proteins so they separate into curds and whey.

The step that matters

Draining and pressing the curd. Removing whey under gentle weight sets the texture of the cheese. Too little draining leaves it soft and wet, while excess pressure can squeeze out moisture unevenly and make it 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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