Name: Cottage Cheese Pie
Ingredients: 1½ cups dry cottage cheese; ½ cup sugar; 3 eggs; a little lemon juice; 1 teaspoon melted butter or cream; 1 teaspoon flour; 1 pie crust

Why it works: Cottage cheese and butter work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 376 recipes. Both carry gamma-decalactone, which smells peach, creamy. The science ↓

Cottage Cheese Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Press the cottage cheese through a colander.
Beat the eggs until light and smooth.
Add the sugar, lemon juice, melted butter or cream, and flour to the eggs.
Mix well and pour into the pie crust.

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.

Cottage cheese + buttertop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together376 recipes

Shared aroma: gamma-decalactone (peach, creamy).
Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together124,287 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together92,116 recipes

Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).
Cottage cheese + eggtop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together601 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).
Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together106,462 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cottage cheese, sugar, egg, butter, flour):

Vanillafits better
Raisinfits better
Pineapplefits about as well
Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cottage cheese, sugar, egg, butter, flour. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.