Name: Sage Cheese or Green Cheese
Ingredients: fresh young red sage-leaves; spinach leaves; 1 teaspoon fine sugar; 1 tablespoon common rennet or 30 drops of Hansen’s extract of rennet; milk

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 ↓

Sage Cheese or Green Cheese

Ingredients

fresh young red sage-leaves
spinach leaves
1 teaspoon fine sugar
1 tablespoon common rennet or 30 drops of Hansen’s extract of rennet
milk

Directions

Prepare the juice

Bruise the tops of fresh sage and spinach leaves and squeeze out the juice.
Add the juice to the rennet extract.

Make the curd

Stir the mixture into the milk according to your taste.
When the curd forms, break it and add salt.

Press and turn

Fill the vat with the curd and press for a few hours.
Turn the cheese every day.

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).
Sugar + milktop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together77,875 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
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).
Spinach + sugartop 32% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,033 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Sugar and milk 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

Rennet: Coagulates the milk proteins so the milk sets into curd.
Sage leaves: Adds the herbal aroma and flavour that give the cheese its character.
Spinach leaves: Contributes juice that is added alongside the sage to the rennet mixture.
Milk: Forms the body of the cheese, setting into curd and then cheese.