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Dessert

Guava Cheese

A sweet, thickened guava dessert made with lime juice, sugar, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Guava and lime share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 30 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Guava Cheese

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the guava pulp

  1. Drain the water or juice from the boiled guavas.

  2. Pass the fruit or pulp through a sieve, discarding the seeds.

Cook and set

  1. Add lime juice and sugar to taste.

  2. Boil over low heat until the mixture is thick enough to hold its shape in a spoon.

  3. Grease a mold with a little butter.

  4. Pour the hot mixture into the mold and place it in a warm oven to dry.

  5. Optionally, improve the color with cochineal.

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. Guava + limetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together30 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Guava + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together35 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  4. Guava + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together115 recipes

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

  5. Lime + sugartop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,332 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Guavas
Provide the fruit pulp and natural pectin that thicken and set the paste.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and, as it concentrates, helps the paste set firm and keep.
Lime juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor and supports pectin setting.

The step that matters

Boil over low heat until thick enough to hold its shape in a spoon. Pectin and sugar need enough cooking to concentrate and gel; undercooked paste stays runny, while overcooking at high heat can scorch the sugars and make it bitter.

Swap the lime

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (guava, sugar, butter):

  1. Coconutfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Pineapplefits better
  4. Limethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against guava, sugar, butter. 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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