Skip to main content
Dessert

Cheese Curd

A sweet cheese cake made from curd, butter, eggs, biscuit powder, lemon, sugar, stale macaroons, and candied orange peel.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Biscuit and almond match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 388 recipes. Both carry nonanal, which smells fat, citrus. The science ↓

Cheese Curd

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the curd

  1. Turn 4 quarts of milk with rennet or lemon juice, or a pinch of tartaric acid.

  2. Drain off the water.

  3. Beat the curd with ½ pound of butter.

  4. Beat in 4 egg yolks, ½ pound of fine biscuit powder or 3 ounces of powdered sponge cake, the rind and juice of 1 lemon, and 6 ounces of sugar until creamed.

  5. Use a spoonful of this mixture to form a short paste as directed.

  6. Cut out the paste for cheese cakes.

  7. Place the paste in deep patty pans.

Make the filling

  1. In each patty pan, put a tablespoonful of the following preparation.

  2. Break up ½ pound of stale macaroons.

  3. Add ½ pound of castor sugar, 2 eggs, 2 egg yolks, 2 ounces of slightly melted butter, and 2 ounces of finely cut candied orange peel.

  4. Beat this mixture with a wooden spoon for several minutes.

  5. Use a tablespoonful as directed.

Bake

  1. Dredge fine sugar over the pastry cases.

  2. Sprinkle with water.

  3. 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.

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. Biscuit + almondtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together388 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  2. Lemon + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  3. Almond + orangetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,125 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  5. Lemon + almondtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Milk
Turned into curd, which forms the body of the cheesecake base.
Eggs
Add structure and richness as they set during baking.
Butter
Adds fat that makes the texture tender and rich.
Castor sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the top brown in the oven.
Stale macaroons
Add almond flavour and a crumbly body to the filling.
Lemon
Its juice and rind add acidity and bright aroma.

The step that matters

Drain off the water from the curd. Excess liquid left in the curd makes the mixture loose and wet, so the paste and filling will not hold their shape or set properly.

Swap the orange

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Coconutfits about as well
  4. Orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, lemon, butter, egg, biscuit, sugar, almond. 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.

You might also like

Orange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesLemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesOrange Cream Rice PuddingOrange Cream Rice Pudding121 recipes