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Pounded Cheese

A smooth cheese spread made by pounding cheese with butter, mustard, spices, and sherry, served on toasted bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Pounded Cheese

Ingredients

Directions

Make the cheese paste

  1. Chop the cheese and place it in a mortar with the butter.

  2. Pound to a smooth paste.

  3. Mix in the mustard, curry powder, ground spice, and black pepper. Stir in the sherry.

Assemble and serve

  1. Cut the bread into halves lengthwise and spread the cheese mixture over them.

  2. Dust with cayenne pepper and arrange on a dish.

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. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  2. Cheese + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,130 recipes

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

  3. Cheese + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,962 recipes

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

  4. Mustard + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,430 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Cheese + mustardtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,805 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Dry cheese
Provides the main body and savoury flavour of the paste.
Butter
Adds fat that softens the cheese and helps it become a smooth, spreadable paste.
Sherry
Adds moisture and a mild acidity that loosens the paste for spreading.
Made mustard
Adds sharp acidity and pungency that cut through the rich cheese and butter.

The step that matters

Pound to a smooth paste. Cheese and butter must be worked until fully blended; lumps of cheese left in the paste will make the spread gritty and uneven.

Swap the mustard

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cheese, butter, pepper, sherry, bread):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Tomatofits better
  3. Potatofits about as well
  4. Mustardthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cheese, butter, pepper, sherry, bread. 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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