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Dessert

Lemon Cheesecakes

A lemon jelly made from sugar, lemon, water, and arrowroot, cooled, broken into pieces, and used to fill pastry cases.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and arrowroot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 553 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Lemon Cheesecakes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the lemon mixture

  1. Rub the sugar on the lemon rind.

  2. Dissolve the sugar in hot water in a basin.

  3. Squeeze the lemon juice into the sugar water.

  4. Heat the mixture in a saucepan, stirring constantly, and thicken with arrowroot until it becomes jelly.

  5. Pour the mixture onto a plate to cool.

Finish and fill

  1. Once cooled, break it into small pieces with two forks.

  2. Fill pastry cases with the lemon mixture.

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. Lemon + arrowroottop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together553 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + arrowroottop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,073 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Lemon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Arrowroot
Thickens the hot liquid as its starch swells, setting the mixture into a jelly-like texture when cooled.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the sharpness of the lemon.
Lemon
Provides acidity and fragrance from the juice and the rind.

The step that matters

Thickening with arrowroot. Arrowroot starch must be heated while stirring constantly so it thickens evenly without lumps or scorching. Prolonged boiling can break down its starch and thin the filling, so it should be removed once it thickens.

“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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