Name: A Plain Sage Cheese
Ingredients: young red sage; spinach; milk; rennet; coarse sea salt

Why it works: Sage and spinach match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 103 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

A Plain Sage Cheese

Ingredients

Directions

Bruise the tops of young red sage in a mortar to extract the juice.
Bruise some spinach leaves and squeeze out the juice.
Mix the sage juice with the spinach juice to achieve a green color.
Add rennet to the milk and mix in the sage juice to color the milk as desired.
When curd forms, gently break it and transfer it to a cheese vat.
Press the curd gently for about eight hours, then salt it.
Turn the cheese daily, and it will be ready in about a month.

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.

Sage + spinachtop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together103 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).
Spinach + milktop 22% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together914 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).
Sage + milktop 26% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together719 recipes

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