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Dessert

Cream Cheese Pie

A baked pie with a cream cheese filling sweetened with sugar and currants, topped with optional meringue or sugar and cinnamon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and vanilla are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 35,032 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Cream Cheese Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Make the filling

  1. Smooth the cream cheese with a mixing spoon, adding cream or milk if too dry.

  2. Stir in the sugar, currants, vanilla, the yolks of the eggs, and the beaten white of one egg.

Bake and finish

  1. Fill the mixture into the pie crust and bake.

  2. Reserve the remaining egg whites for meringue or sprinkle the pie with sugar and cinnamon if preferred without meringue.

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. Sugar + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  2. Cream cheese + vanillatop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,929 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity, apple peel).

  3. Currant + vanillatop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together514 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  4. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

  5. Cream cheese + eggtop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,549 recipes

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

Sugar and vanilla barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 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

Cream cheese
Forms the rich, creamy body of the filling.
Eggs
Help the filling set as it bakes, giving it structure.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps balance the tartness of the cheese.
Currants
Add fruity sweetness and chewy texture throughout the filling.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cream cheese, sugar, egg, vanilla):

  1. Blueberryfits better
  2. Strawberryfits better
  3. Bananafits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cream cheese, sugar, egg, vanilla. 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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