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Pot-Cheese

A cheese made by curdling sour milk, draining, mixing with salt, milk, and butter, then forming into balls or cakes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Pot-Cheese

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the curd

  1. Heat the sour milk until it breaks and the curd forms a cake at the bottom.

  2. Pour the curd and whey into a coarse muslin bag.

  3. Let it hang to drain without squeezing until dry.

Season and shape

  1. Chop the curd in a wooden bowl.

  2. Add salt.

  3. Mix with milk and butter until smooth.

  4. Mould into balls or cakes.

  5. Shape on a cold plate.

  6. Store in a cool place.

  7. Before serving, soften with more milk.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

What each ingredient does

Sour milk
Its acidity causes the milk to separate into curd and whey, forming the base of the cheese.
Butter
Adds fat, giving the smooth mixed curd a richer texture and mouthfeel.
Milk
Added to the curd to make it smooth and to soften it again before serving.

The step that matters

Let the curd drain without squeezing. Squeezing forces out moisture unevenly and can make the curd crumbly; gentle hanging lets whey drain slowly so the curd stays smooth and dry enough to shape.

“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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