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Sage Cheese

A cheese made by mixing sage and spinach leaf juice with milk and rennet, then curdled, salted, pressed, and aged.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sage and spinach match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 103 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

Sage Cheese

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and curdle

  1. Pound the tops of fresh sage leaves with an equal amount of spinach leaves.

  2. Squeeze out the juice.

  3. Add the juice to some extract of rennet and stir into the milk to taste.

  4. When the curd forms, break it.

  5. Add coarse sea salt.

Press and age

  1. Put the curd into a vat and press for a few hours.

  2. Remove from the press and rub and turn the cheese every day for two weeks.

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. Sage + spinachtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together103 recipes

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

  2. Spinach + milktop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together914 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  3. Sage + milktop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together719 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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

What each ingredient does

Milk
Forms the body of the cheese once rennet causes it to set into curd.
Extract of rennet
Enzyme that coagulates the milk, turning it into curd that can be broken and pressed.
Fresh young sage leaves
Supplies the herbal aroma and flavour that marks this cheese.

The step that matters

Stirring the rennet juice into the milk. Rennet must be spread evenly through the milk so that the curd sets uniformly. Uneven mixing can give patchy curd that is hard to break and press evenly.

Swap the sage

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

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Cuminfits better
  4. Sagethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against spinach, milk. 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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