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Dessert

White Pumpkin Cheese

A dessert made by simmering grated pumpkin with sugar syrup, optionally flavored with cardamom, then served cold.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Pumpkin and cardamom work together. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 58 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

White Pumpkin Cheese

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pumpkin

  1. Remove the soft pith and seeds from the pumpkin.

  2. Grate the firm part of the pumpkin.

  3. Place the grated pumpkin on a coarse towel.

  4. Pour cold water over the grated pumpkin and wash well.

  5. Drain off all the water through the towel, then weigh the pumpkin.

Make the pumpkin cheese

  1. Prepare a syrup with an equal weight of sugar.

  2. Stir the pumpkin and syrup together.

  3. Simmer the mixture, adding cardamom seeds if desired.

  4. Pour the thickened mixture into buttered plates.

  5. Serve cold.

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. Pumpkin + cardamomtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together58 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Sugar + cardamomtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,044 recipes

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

  3. Pumpkin + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,350 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Pumpkin
Provides the grated bulk that forms the body of the finished pumpkin cheese.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and, dissolved in a syrup, helps the mixture thicken as it simmers.

The step that matters

Draining the grated pumpkin. Pumpkin releases water when grated and washed. Any water left in the mixture dilutes the sugar syrup and slows thickening, so draining it thoroughly through the towel helps the mass set firm.

Swap the cardamom

The recipe marks cardamom as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pumpkin, sugar):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Gingerfits about as well
  3. Cardamomthe original
  4. Nutmegfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against pumpkin, sugar. 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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