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Artificial Cheese

A homemade cheese made from milk, cream, eggs, and wine vinegar, flavored with spices and sweetened with sugar and rose water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,917 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Artificial Cheese

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pound some nutmeg, mace, and cinnamon.

Make the curds

  1. In a large pot, combine the milk and cream and bring to a boil.

  2. Add the eggs and wine vinegar to the boiling mixture to curdle the milk.

  3. Continue boiling until it forms curds.

  4. Tie the curds in cheesecloth.

Drain and serve

  1. Let the cheese hang for 6 to 8 hours to drain.

  2. Remove the spices from the cheese.

  3. Sweeten the cheese with sugar and rose water.

  4. Transfer the cheese to a colander.

  5. Let it sit for an additional hour.

  6. Turn the cheese out onto a dish.

  7. Serve with cream underneath.

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. Nutmeg + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,917 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Nutmeg + macetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Mace + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,611 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  4. Milk + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Wine + vinegartop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,493 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

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

What each ingredient does

Whole milk
Forms the body of the cheese as its proteins curdle and set into curds.
Cream
Adds richness and fat, giving the curds a softer, smoother texture.
Eggs
Add protein that helps bind the curds and firm up the cheese as it cooks.
Wine vinegar
Acid that curdles the hot milk, separating curds from whey.

The step that matters

Adding the eggs and vinegar to the boiling milk. The acid must be added to hot milk so the proteins coagulate into curds. Adding too little acid leaves the milk uncurdled, and stirring gently keeps the curds from breaking into small pieces.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, cream, egg, wine, vinegar, nutmeg, cinnamon):

  1. Clovefits better
  2. Allspicefits better
  3. Cardamomfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, cream, egg, wine, vinegar, nutmeg, cinnamon. 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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