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Dessert

Cheese-cake

A baked cheese cake made from curdled milk, egg yolks, butter, currants, and a flour‑egg‑butter crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,318 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Cheese-cake

Ingredients

Directions

Make the curd

  1. Heat the milk and add rennet; let it curdle.

  2. Tie the curd in a cloth and drain the whey.

  3. Place the curd in a fine sieve and rub through with a spoon.

Make the filling

  1. Add the egg yolks, rosewater or lemon juice, nutmeg, and sugar; mix well.

  2. Stir in the currants and pour into a baking dish.

Make the crust and bake

  1. For the crust, mix flour, egg yolks, sugar, and enough butter to form a paste.

  2. Cover the cheese mixture with the crust and bake 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.

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 + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Nutmeg + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour 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

Milk
Curdles with rennet to form the curd that becomes the body of the cheesecake.
Egg yolks
Add richness and help the filling set when baked.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the crust, binding it into a paste.
Currants
Add sweetness and chewy texture scattered through the filling.
Flour
Provides structure to the crust paste.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to the filling and crust.

The step that matters

Rub the curd through a fine sieve. Pressing the curd through a fine sieve breaks up lumps and gives the filling a smooth, even texture. Skipping this leaves a grainy result, since drained curd clumps together.

Swap the currant

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

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

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