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A Nut Cheese Nest

A dish of cooked peanut butter and cornmeal formed into a nest, filled with egg yolks and garnished with parsley or watercress.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

A Nut Cheese Nest

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Mix the peanut butter, cornmeal, water, and lemon juice thoroughly.

  2. Cook the mixture as you would nutmeat until fully cooked.

  3. Allow to cool completely, then crumble into very fine pieces.

Assemble and serve

  1. Heap the crumbled mixture onto a large, round plate.

  2. Create a cavity in the center and place the yolks of the hard-boiled eggs inside.

  3. Garnish the edge with parsley or watercress.

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 + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

  2. Butter + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  3. Peanut + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,754 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  4. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

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

  5. Peanut + parsleytop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together108 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Raw peanut butter
Provides the base body and rich nutty flavor of the mixture.
White cornmeal
Thickens the mixture as it cooks, giving it a firm, crumbly structure once cooled.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor and balances the richness of the peanut butter.
Hard-boiled eggs
Yolks are placed in the cavity as a rich, creamy contrast to the crumbled mixture.

The step that matters

Cool completely before crumbling. The cooked mixture must cool fully to firm up; if it is still warm, it will stick together and be hard to crumble into fine, even pieces.

Swap the peanut

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

  1. Chickpeafits better
  2. Walnutfits better
  3. Pistachiofits better
  4. Peanutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, lemon, egg, parsley. 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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