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Cheese Hominy Souffles

A baked soufflé made with hominy, milk, butter, cheese, and eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter 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 Hominy Souffles

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the base

  1. Stir hominy into boiling milk and cook over low heat until stiff.

  2. Add oiled butter, grated cheese, and egg yolks; season with salt, white pepper, and cayenne.

Assemble and bake

  1. Whisk egg whites to stiff peaks and fold into the mixture.

  2. Butter ramekin cases and fill with the mixture.

  3. Bake in a 350°F (175°C) oven for 20 minutes.

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 + buttertop 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

Egg whites
Whipped to stiff peaks, they trap air and lift the mixture as it bakes.
Egg yolks
Enrich the base and help it set into a custard-like texture.
Hominy
Cooked into the milk to thicken it and give the soufflé its body.
Grated cheese
Adds rich savory flavor and fat to the base.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the hominy thickens and the eggs set into.

The step that matters

Folding in the egg whites. Whites must be whipped to stiff peaks and folded gently. Overmixing knocks out the trapped air, so the soufflé rises less and turns dense.

Swap the white pepper

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

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, butter, cheese, egg, pepper. 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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