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Dessert

Cheese Cakes

Cheese cakes are a sweet pastry dish made with curdled milk, eggs, almonds, sugar, butter, rosewater, and puff pastry.

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

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

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.

Make the curd

  1. Boil the milk in a saucepan.

  2. Beat the egg yolks and egg whites together.

  3. Stir the eggs into the boiling milk and cook until the curd is firm.

  4. Squeeze the curd in a cloth until very dry.

Make the filling

  1. Mix the dry curd with the ground almonds, sugar, melted butter, rosewater, and eggs. Combine all ingredients well.

  2. Line small saucers with puff pastry and fill with the mixture.

Bake

  1. Bake in a preheated oven at 350°F (175°C) until set.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Almond + buttertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,245 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

  3. Milk + almondtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,800 recipes

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

  4. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Set the curd and bind the filling into a firm, sliceable custard.
Milk
Forms the moist base of the curd that the eggs thicken.
Ground almonds
Add body and a rich, nutty texture to the filling.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and helps it brown lightly in the oven.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a tender, moist crumb.

The step that matters

Squeeze the curd until very dry. Excess whey left in the curd makes the filling watery, so it may not set firmly in the pastry and can make the pastry soggy.

Swap the almond

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

  1. Pecansfits about as well
  2. Almondthe original
  3. Cocoafits less well
  4. Walnutfits less well

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