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Dessert

Excellent Damson Cheese

A preserved cheese made from damsons and sugar, cooked until dry and set in molds.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and spirit work together. They rank in the top 25% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 602 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Excellent Damson Cheese

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Bake or stew the damsons until tender, then drain off the juice.

  2. Skin and stone the damsons, and return ⅓ to ½ of the juice to the fruit.

  3. Weigh the damsons and boil them over a brisk fire until they form a dry paste.

Make the cheese

  1. Add 6 ounces of pounded sugar for each pound of damsons and stir until dissolved.

  2. Continue boiling while stirring until the mixture leaves the pan dry and adheres to the spoon.

  3. To test, it should not stick to your fingers when lightly touched.

  4. Quickly press the mixture into pans or molds.

Store

  1. Once completely cool, cover with paper dipped in spirit and tie another layer over it.

  2. Store in a dry place.

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. Sugar + spirittop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together602 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

What each ingredient does

Damsons
Provide the fruit body and pectin that set the thick, sliceable paste.
Pounded sugar
Sweetens the fruit and helps the paste thicken and keep as it cools.

The step that matters

Boiling until the mixture leaves the pan dry. Too little cooking leaves excess water, so the paste stays soft and may spoil; too much makes it hard. Stirring constantly prevents scorching on the base of the pan, as the sugar and fruit concentrate.

“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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