Why it works: Milk and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 88,785 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓
Cheese Cakes
Ingredients
Directions
Make the filling
Pour the sour milk through a sieve, using only the thick curd.
Beat in the sugar, egg yolks, and flavouring.
Line and bake
Roll out the flaky pastry and line pans with it.
Fill the pastry with rice or crusts of bread and bake for about 10 minutes.
Remove the rice or crusts and fill the pastry with the cheese cake mixture.
Finish baking and let cool on a sieve.
Serve
Sprinkle with sugar and serve cold.
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.
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Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together88,785 recipes
Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
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Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together77,875 recipes
Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
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Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together122,807 recipes
Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Milk and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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
- Sour milk curd
- Forms the body of the filling, giving the cheese cake its soft, tangy base.
- Eggs
- Bind the filling and help it set firm as it bakes.
- Flaky pastry
- Forms a crisp, layered shell that holds the filling.
- Sugar
- Adds sweetness and helps balance the sour curd.
The step that matters
Pre-bake the pastry shell with rice or bread crusts. Weighting the raw pastry keeps it from puffing and shrinking, so the shell stays flat and crisp before the wet filling goes in. Without this, the base can turn soggy under the custard-like filling.
“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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