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Puff Paste and Cheese, or Bame Quins

A puff pastry folded with grated cheese, baked into square rolls.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and cheese are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,962 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Puff Paste and Cheese, or Bame Quins

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Make puff pastry using 1 pound of flour and 12 ounces of butter.

  2. Roll and fold the dough twice, ensuring all the butter is incorporated.

Add cheese and fold

  1. Roll it out again and spread grated cheese evenly over the surface.

  2. Fold and roll out the dough again, spreading cheese on it once more.

  3. Repeat this process until the dough has been folded 5 times.

Shape and bake

  1. Roll the dough thin.

  2. Cut it into squares about 2.5 inches wide.

  3. Fold the squares over like split rolls.

  4. Brush with egg.

  5. 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. Butter + cheesetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,962 recipes

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

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Cheese + eggtop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,253 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Flour and butter 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

What each ingredient does

All-purpose flour
Forms the gluten network that gives the layered dough its structure.
Unsalted butter
Creates separate layers that puff up into flaky pastry as steam forms during baking.
Grated cheese
Adds flavor and melts between the layers, adding richness and savory taste.
Egg
Brushed on as an egg wash, it promotes browning and a glossy surface.

The step that matters

Roll and fold the dough with the butter intact. If the butter breaks into the dough or warms and smears, the layers merge and the pastry will not puff properly. Keeping the dough cold between folds preserves the distinct butter layers that create flakiness.

“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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