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Cheesecakes Common

A custard-like cheesecake made with milk, eggs, currants, rose water, and puff pastry crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Currant and rose work together. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 494 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Cheesecakes Common

Ingredients

Directions

Make the curd

  1. Heat the milk in a pot until it boils.

  2. Beat the eggs well.

  3. Add the beaten eggs to the boiling milk, stirring until it curdles.

  4. Pour the curdled mixture into a bowl and let it cool.

  5. Once cool, mix in the currants, rose water, and salt.

Assemble and bake

  1. Prepare a puff pastry and line a baking dish with it.

  2. Pour the mixture into the pastry-lined dish.

  3. If using patty tins, butter them to help release the cheesecakes after baking.

  4. If using glass or china, only cover with an upper crust and bake.

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. Currant + rosetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together494 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  3. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Milk + rosetop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,249 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Egg + curranttop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,734 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Set the curd as they cook and thicken, giving the cheesecake its body.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the curd, which the eggs coagulate into a soft custard.
Currants
Add small pockets of sweetness and fruit flavour throughout the filling.
Puff pastry
Forms a flaky, buttery crust that holds the filling in the dish.

The step that matters

Adding the beaten eggs to the boiling milk. The eggs must be stirred in steadily so they curdle into soft, even curds. If they are added too fast or the mixture is left unstirred, the eggs can scramble into lumps.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raspberryfits better
  3. Lemonfits about as well
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, egg, rose. 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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