Skip to main content
Dessert

Cheese Cakes

A baked dessert made from sweet and sour milk curd, eggs, sugar, lemon, almonds, and baked until firm.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
Cheese Cakes

Why it works: Lemon and almond match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,655 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Cheese Cakes

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the curd

  1. Scald sweet and sour milk in a double boiler.

  2. Strain the mixture through cheesecloth.

Fill and bake

  1. Add slightly beaten egg yolks, sugar, lemon juice, and salt to the curd.

  2. Line a small patty tin with pastry.

  3. Fill the tin with the mixture and sprinkle with chopped almonds.

  4. Bake until the mixture is firm to the touch.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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 + almondtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

  3. Milk + almondtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,800 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Almond + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,679 recipes

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

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

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

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

Egg yolks
Thicken the filling and enrich it as they set, giving a firm, custard-like texture.
Sour milk
Its acidity curdles when scalded, forming the soft curd that gives the cake its body.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and helps give the set custard a tender texture.
Lemon
Juice adds acidity and the grated rind adds aroma to the filling.

The step that matters

Bake until the mixture is firm to the touch. Egg proteins set as they heat, so underbaking leaves a runny filling while overbaking can make it dry and grainy. Check firmness at the centre rather than relying on time alone.

Swap the almond

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, lemon, egg, sugar):

  1. Milletfits about as well
  2. Almondthe original
  3. Pistachiofits about as well
  4. Walnutfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, lemon, egg, 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.

More cheese cakes recipes

Potato 13Almond 8Lemon 7English 5Polenta 5Rice 5 See all 19 →

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesLemon CustardLemon Custard64 recipes