Name: Cold Cheese Souffles
Ingredients: ½ cup Double Cream; 2 teaspoons made Mustard; ½ cup Aspic Jelly; 2 oz grated Parmesan; Seasonings to taste; Chopped Aspic (colored); Few sprigs Watercress or Endive

Why it works: Mustard and watercress match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 293 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Cold Cheese Souffles

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soufflé

Lightly whip the cream until it is not as stiff as for ordinary cream.
Add seasonings, then stir in the cheese and aspic jelly.
When the mixture is almost set, pour it into small soufflé cases.

Garnish and serve

Garnish each case with chopped aspic jelly (both red and clear).
Place on a dish with lace paper and garnish with a few sprigs of watercress.

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.

Mustard + watercresstop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together293 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Cream + watercresstop 26% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together211 recipes

Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).
Cream + mustardtop 26% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,935 recipes

Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

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

What each ingredient does

Double cream: Whipped lightly to give the soufflé its airy, light texture.
Parmesan: Adds savory flavor and body to the mixture.
Aspic jelly: Gelatin-based setting agent that firms the mixture so it holds its shape cold.

The step that matters

Pour when the mixture is almost set. Aspic is gelatin, which sets as it cools. If the mixture is still fluid when poured into cases, it will not hold its soufflé shape; if it has set fully, it cannot be poured and will not blend into a smooth, light texture.