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Cheese Omelet

A quick cheese omelet cooked in butter and milk, served on buttered toast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Cheese Omelet

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Heat a shallow pan over medium heat and add the butter.

  2. Pour in the milk and add the sliced cheese.

  3. Crack in the eggs and season with salt and pepper.

  4. Stir the mixture vigorously until it thickens.

  5. Serve immediately on buttered toast.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Butter + cheesetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,962 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Milk + cheesetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,426 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  4. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Cheese + peppertop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,861 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Set into a structure that holds the cheese and gives the omelette its body as they cook.
Milk
Adds moisture and makes the egg mixture softer and more tender when cooked.
Cheese
Melts into the eggs, adding richness, fat and savoury flavour.
Butter
Adds fat for flavour and helps keep the eggs from sticking to the pan.

The step that matters

Stir the mixture vigorously until it thickens. Eggs set when their proteins coagulate under heat. Stirring keeps the curds small and tender, while letting the mixture sit still can leave it rubbery or uneven.

“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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