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Puff Cheese Pingebs

A puff pastry sandwich filled with a cheese mixture, baked until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Puff Cheese Pingebs

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the filling

  1. Roll out the puff pastry to an eighth of an inch thick and cut it into two squares.

  2. In a saucepan, combine the cheese and butter with the lemon juice and heat until hot.

  3. Stir in more than half of the beaten egg yolks and cayenne until the yolks begin to set, then remove from heat and let cool.

Assemble and bake

  1. Spread the cheese mixture on one piece of pastry, place the other on top like a sandwich, and trim the edges.

  2. Cut into slices or fingers and place on a baking sheet half an inch apart.

  3. Brush the tops with egg yolk, sprinkle with grated cheese, and bake at 400°F (200°C) for 15 to 20 minutes until light brown.

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 + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Cheese + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,962 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

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

  4. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Cheese + peppertop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,861 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Puff pastry
Forms the flaky, layered outer shell that puffs and crisps when baked.
Gruyère cheese
Provides the rich, savory filling and melts into a creamy center.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smooth, silky texture in the filling.
Egg yolks
Thicken the filling as they set and give the tops a golden color.

The step that matters

Setting the egg yolks in the cheese mixture. Egg yolks thicken when heated but can scramble if overheated. Stir them in off the heat or with the pan barely warm, and stop as soon as they begin to set, so the filling stays smooth and creamy rather than grainy.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cheese, butter, egg, pepper):

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Figfits about as well
  3. Plumfits about as well
  4. Grapefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against cheese, butter, egg, pepper. 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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