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Dessert

Cheese Cakes

A sweet cheese cake made with milk, rennet, sugar, butter, nutmeg, eggs, currants or lemon rind.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Cheese Cakes

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 Cakes

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the curd

  1. Dissolve 1 tablespoon rennet in 1 quart of new milk and keep it near the fire until curd forms.

  2. Drain the whey through a sieve.

Mix the filling

  1. Rub 4 tablespoons powdered sugar, ½ cup butter, 1 grated nutmeg, and 1 egg yolk into the curd.

  2. Beat well, then add 1 whole egg and beat again.

  3. Mix in ½ pound dried currants or the grated rind and juice of 1 lemon.

Bake

  1. Line patty pans with rich pastry, half fill them, dust with sugar, and bake.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Milk + nutmegtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,685 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Butter + nutmegtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together24,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Milk + curranttop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,475 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  5. Nutmeg + curranttop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,983 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

What each ingredient does

New milk
Forms the curd that becomes the body of the filling.
Rennet
Causes the milk to coagulate into curd.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, giving the filling a tender texture.
Egg yolk
Adds richness and helps bind the filling.
Whole egg
Adds structure and helps bind the filling as it sets.
Powdered sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the filling brown lightly in the oven.

The step that matters

Drain the whey through a sieve. If too much whey remains, the curd stays wet and the filling can turn soggy or runny when baked. Draining well gives a firmer, drier curd that holds its shape in the pastry.

Swap the currant

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

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

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