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Artificial Cheese

A spiced cheese made by curdling milk and cream with eggs and vinegar, then draining and sweetening.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,917 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Artificial Cheese

Ingredients

Directions

Make the curds

  1. In a saucepan, boil together the milk and cream with a moderate amount of nutmeg, mace, and cinnamon.

  2. Beat the eggs and mix them into the milk along with the vinegar, continuing to boil until curds form.

Drain and flavor

  1. Turn the mixture into a cheesecloth, tie it up, and let it hang for 6 to 8 hours to drain.

  2. Remove the cheese from the cloth, flavor with rose-water, and sweeten with caster sugar.

  3. Transfer the cheese to a colander and let it sit for 1 to 2 hours.

Serve

  1. Cover the bottom of a dish with cream, place the cheese on top, and serve.

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. Nutmeg + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,917 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Nutmeg + macetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Mace + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,611 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  4. Milk + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Cream + nutmegtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,920 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

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

What each ingredient does

Milk
Forms the body of the cheese as its proteins coagulate into curds.
Cream
Adds fat, making the cheese richer and softer in texture.
Eggs
Their proteins set when heated, helping to bind the curds together.
White vinegar
Acid causes the milk proteins to separate from the whey and form curds.

The step that matters

Boiling after adding the eggs and vinegar. Curds only form once the acid and heat work on the milk proteins. Stopping too early leaves the milk liquid, while overheating can make the eggs turn grainy or tough.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, cream, nutmeg, cinnamon, egg, vinegar, rose):

  1. Cardamomfits better
  2. Allspicefits better
  3. Clovefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, cream, nutmeg, cinnamon, egg, vinegar, rose. 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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