Skip to main content
Snack

Cheese Fixgers

Cheese Fixgers are baked cheese strips made from flour, milk, cheese, butter, salt, pepper, and egg yolks.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Cheese Fixgers

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a moderate oven”. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare the dough

  1. Sift the flour onto a clean surface and make a hole in the center.

  2. Add the milk or cream, grated cheese, butter, salt, pepper, and egg yolks into the hole.

  3. Mix the ingredients with your fingers until a smooth paste forms.

Shape and bake

  1. Roll out the paste to ¼ inch thick and cut into short narrow strips.

  2. Place the strips on a buttered baking pan and bake in a moderate oven at 350°F (175°C) until light yellow.

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).

  2. Cheese + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,962 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Milk + cheesetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,426 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  4. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Flour
Provides the structure that holds the dough together and sets as it bakes.
Butter
Adds fat for a tender, crisp texture and rich flavor.
Egg yolks
Bind the dough and add richness and color.
Grated cheese
Adds savory flavor and some fat, and browns slightly in the oven.
Milk or cream
Adds moisture so the flour can form a smooth, workable paste.

The step that matters

Bake until light yellow, not brown. The crackers keep cooking after leaving the oven and their thin strips can scorch quickly. Pulling them at light yellow keeps them crisp and mild rather than bitter and dark.

“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.

You might also like

FrittersFritters56 recipesCrisp CrackersCrisp Crackers7 recipes