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Dessert

Cheese Cakes From Curd

A sweet cheese cake made from curd, butter, sugar, eggs, nutmeg, and currants, baked at 400°F.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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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 Cakes From Curd

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the curd

  1. Add 1 teaspoon of rennet to 1 quart of new milk.

  2. Keep the mixture near the fire.

  3. Drain the whey through a sieve.

Make the filling

  1. Rub 4 tablespoons of powdered sugar, ½ pound of butter, grated nutmeg, and 1 egg yolk into the curd.

  2. Beat the mixture. Add 1 whole egg and beat again.

  3. Mix in ½ pound of currants.

Bake

  1. Line patty pans with rich pastry.

  2. Half fill the pans with the mixture.

  3. Sprinkle the tops with sugar.

  4. Bake in a well-heated oven at 400°F (200°C).

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. Milk + nutmegtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,685 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Butter + nutmegtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together24,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Milk + curranttop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,475 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  5. Nutmeg + curranttop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,983 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

What each ingredient does

New milk
Forms the curd that gives the filling its body.
Rennet
Causes the milk to set into curd by coagulating its proteins.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a tender, moist texture.
Egg yolk
Adds richness and helps bind the filling.
Whole egg
Adds structure as it sets during baking.
Currants
Add sweetness and chewy bursts of fruit throughout the filling.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, sugar, butter, nutmeg, egg):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Lemonfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, sugar, butter, nutmeg, egg. 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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