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Rush Cream Cheese

A cheese made by curdling fresh cream and milk with rennet, then pressing and ripening in a straw vat.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Rush Cream Cheese

Why it works: Milk and wheat are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,418 recipes. Both carry (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal, which smells cucumber, melon. The science ↓

Rush Cream Cheese

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Warm the milk until it is just warm enough to mix with the cream.

  2. Prepare a vat using wheat-straw or rushes sewn together, open at the top and bottom.

Make the curd

  1. Combine the cream, warm milk, sugar, and rennet in a bowl.

  2. Set the mixture near the fire until the curd forms.

  3. Place the vat on a square of straw or mesh and cover it with another square.

Ripen and press

  1. The next day, remove the cheese and repeat the process to ripen it.

  2. Use a half-pound weight to press the cheese.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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 + wheattop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

  2. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  3. Cream + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together29,399 recipes

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

  4. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Cream + wheattop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together681 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

Milk and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Fresh cream
Provides fat and richness, giving the cheese a soft, creamy texture.
New milk
Supplies milk solids and water that form the curd together with the cream.
Rennet
Enzyme that coagulates the milk so it sets into a curd.

The step that matters

Set the mixture near the fire until the curd forms. Rennet needs gentle, steady warmth to set the milk into curd; too hot or too cold and the curd may fail to form properly or may become grainy or tough.

“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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