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Dessert

Egg Cheese

A custard made from eggs, milk, cream, and almonds, flavored with sugar, cinnamon, and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and almond match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,514 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Egg Cheese

Ingredients

Directions

Make the curd

  1. Beat the eggs well.

  2. Mix the beaten eggs with the milk, sugar, cinnamon, and lemon peel in a saucepan.

  3. Set the mixture over low heat.

  4. Stir the mixture constantly.

  5. Add the lemon juice to curdle the mixture.

  6. Let the mixture drain into your preferred shape.

  7. Refrigerate the mixture until cold.

Make the almond cream

  1. Heat finely ground sweet almonds with a little cream for the almond cream.

  2. Add 1 pint of cream to the almond mixture.

  3. Bring the almond mixture to a boil.

  4. Strain the almond mixture.

  5. Stir in the beaten egg yolks.

  6. Cook the mixture over low heat until it thickens like custard.

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. Cinnamon + almondtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,514 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Cinnamon + lemontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  4. Milk + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Eggs
Set the structure of the curd and thicken the custard when cooked.
Lemon juice
Acidity curdles the milk, separating it into solids that can be shaped.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the eggs coagulate into a curd.
Cream
Adds richness and fat, giving the custard a smooth, soft texture.
Egg yolks
Add richness and further thicken the almond cream as it cooks.
Sweet almonds
Provide nutty flavour and body to the almond cream.

The step that matters

Cook the almond cream over low heat after adding the yolks. Egg yolks thicken through gentle heat, and high heat can scramble them. Stirring constantly and keeping the heat low lets the custard thicken smoothly.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, milk, sugar, cinnamon, cream, almond):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, milk, sugar, cinnamon, cream, 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.

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