Skip to main content
Main

Sage Cheese

A cheese made by bruising sage and corn or bean leaves, steeping them in milk, coloring half the milk, and forming curds.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Milk and corn are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,955 recipes. Both carry hexanal, which smells green, grassy. The science ↓

Sage Cheese

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the leaf juice

  1. Bruise the sage and corn or bean leaves in a mortar.

  2. Place the bruised leaves in a strainer bag and pour warm milk over them several times.

  3. Squeeze the bag to extract all the juice.

  4. Color half of the milk with the extracted juice.

Set the milk

  1. Set 5 gallons of milk in one tub and the remaining 5 gallons in another.

  2. Combine the colored milk in one tub and leave the other plain.

Make and press the curds

  1. Make curds from both tubs separately or together.

  2. Mix the curds evenly and press them together.

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. Milk + corntop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  2. Sage + corntop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together143 recipes

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

  3. Milk + sagetop 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
Provides the protein that sets into curds, forming the cheese itself.
Sage leaves
Their juice gives the milk a green color and herbal aroma.
Corn or bean leaves
Their juice adds green color to half of the milk.

The step that matters

Mix the curds evenly and press them together. The colored and plain curds set separately, so uneven mixing leaves streaks of color and an uneven texture in the finished cheese.

Swap the sage

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, corn. 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.

You might also like

Corn FrittersCorn Fritters203 recipesCream of Corn SoupCream of Corn Soup50 recipesGreen Corn SoupGreen Corn Soup46 recipesCornmeal GruelCornmeal Gruel41 recipes