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Dessert

Egg Cheese

Egg Cheese is a dairy cheese made from milk, eggs, sugar, cinnamon, lemon, orange, and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Egg Cheese

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the base

  1. Combine the milk, egg yolks, and egg whites in a bowl. Beat and strain the mixture.

  2. Dissolve sugar in water and add it to the mixture along with cinnamon, lemon rind, and orange rind. Mix well.

  3. Squeeze in the lemon juice before heating.

Make the cheese

  1. Heat slowly, stirring with a wooden spoon until it forms a soft curd. Remove from heat and drain in a frame for 2 hours.

Make the cream and serve

  1. Whisk together cream, egg yolks, dissolved sugar, flour, cinnamon, and lemon and orange rinds in a pan over low heat until it bubbles.

  2. Let the cream cool, then pour it over the cheese before serving.

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 + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

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

  2. Cinnamon + orangetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,437 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Cinnamon + lemontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Cinnamon + flourtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 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

Eggs
Egg proteins coagulate on heating, setting the milk into a soft curd.
Milk
Forms the body of the curd that the egg proteins set.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, velvety texture to the cream sauce.
Fine flour
Thickens the cream mixture so it holds its body when heated.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the acidity of the lemon juice.

The step that matters

Heat slowly, stirring constantly. Egg proteins set at moderate temperatures, so heating too fast or without stirring can scramble the eggs and make the curd grainy instead of soft and smooth.

Swap the orange

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Blueberryfits about as well
  4. Orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, egg, sugar, cinnamon, lemon, cream, flour. 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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