Skip to main content
Dessert

Cheesecakes, Lemon

A lemon-flavored cheesecake made with sugar, butter, eggs, biscuit crumbs, almonds, lemon rind, juice, brandy, flour, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Biscuit and almond match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 388 recipes. Both carry nonanal, which smells fat, citrus. The science ↓

Cheesecakes, Lemon

Ingredients

Directions

Make the filling

  1. Melt ½ cup sugar and ½ cup butter slowly in a saucepan.

  2. Add 2 egg yolks, 1 egg white, crushed Savoy biscuit, blanched almonds, lemon rind, lemon juice, and brandy; mix well.

Make the pastry and bake

  1. In a bowl, combine 2 cups flour with 4 ounces (½ cup) of butter, then add 6 tablespoons water to form a paste.

  2. Incorporate the lemon mixture into the paste.

  3. Roll out the remaining butter into the paste and bake until golden.

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. Biscuit + almondtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together388 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  2. Almond + flourtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,673 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Biscuit + flourtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together889 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Almond + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Butter + almondtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,245 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Forms the structure of the paste when combined with water.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a tender, flaky texture in the paste.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and dissolves into the melted butter.
Egg yolks
Add richness and help bind and thicken the filling.
Egg white
Adds structure and helps bind the lemon mixture.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity and bright lemon flavour.

The step that matters

Adding the egg yolks and white to the melted butter and sugar. Eggs scramble if they meet very hot fat or sugar too quickly. Letting the melted mixture cool slightly and mixing well helps the eggs blend smoothly into a uniform filling.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, butter, egg, biscuit, almond, brandy, flour):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, butter, egg, biscuit, almond, brandy, 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.

More lemon cheesecake recipes

Pudding 3 See all 96 →

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesBaking Powder BiscuitBaking Powder Biscuit119 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipes