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Dessert

Cheese Cake

A custard-like cake made with cottage cheese, sugar, eggs, lemon, flour, milk, and optional currants.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Cottage cheese and milk work together. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 239 recipes. Both carry ethyl 2-methylbutyrate, which smells fruity, apple. The science ↓

Cheese Cake

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

Make the batter

  1. Beat the sugar and egg yolks until light.

  2. Add the flour, grated lemon rind, lemon juice, and cottage cheese, and mix well.

  3. Stir in the sweet milk.

  4. Beat the egg whites to a stiff froth and fold them into the mixture.

Bake

  1. Line a deep pan with pie crust and pour in the mixture.

  2. Optionally, sprinkle currants on top before baking.

  3. Bake until set, similar to a custard pie.

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. Cottage cheese + milktop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together239 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl 2-methylbutyrate (fruity, apple).

  2. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  4. Lemon + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

  5. Egg + cottage cheesetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together601 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Cottage cheese
Provides the body and creamy, moist structure of the cake.
Eggs
Yolks enrich and set the custard, while whipped whites lighten the batter.
Sugar
Sweetens the batter and helps the yolks beat to a light, smooth texture.
Flour
Adds a small amount of structure so the filling holds together when set.
Lemon
Its rind and juice add aroma and a bright acidity that balances the sweetness.

The step that matters

Fold in the stiff egg whites. Whites whipped to a stiff froth trap air that lightens the batter; overmixing or deflating them makes the cake dense and flat.

Swap the currant

The recipe marks currant as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, lemon, egg, cottage cheese, flour, milk):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Blueberryfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, lemon, egg, cottage cheese, flour, milk. 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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