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 Cakes
Ingredients
Directions
Make the curd
Pour 2 quarts of milk into a stew-pan and heat it near the fire.
Stir in 2 tablespoons of rennet and let it sit until set, about 1 hour.
Break the curd with your hand and let it sit for another 30 minutes.
Pour off the whey and place the curd in a colander to drain.
Once dry, pound the curd in a mortar until smooth.
Finish the cake
Add 4 ounces of pounded and sifted sugar and 3 ounces of fresh butter.
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.
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Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together81,283 recipes
Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).
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Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together98,233 recipes
Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).
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Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together77,875 recipes
Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
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
- Milk
- Its proteins coagulate into the curd that forms the body of the cake.
- Rennet
- An enzyme that clots the milk into a firm curd.
- Sugar
- Adds sweetness to the mellow curd.
- Fresh butter
- Adds fat for richness and a smoother, softer texture.
The step that matters
Let the milk set undisturbed. Rennet clots the milk proteins into a gel as it sits. Moving or stirring the milk while it sets breaks the forming gel, leaving a looser, weaker curd that drains poorly.
“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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