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Stilton Cheese

A traditional English blue cheese made from milk, cream, salt, and rennet, aged and wrapped in cloth.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 29,399 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Stilton Cheese

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the milk

  1. Mix the sweet cream with a kettle of boiling water in a small tub until well combined.

  2. Pour the mixture into a cheese tub with the warm milk.

  3. When the mixture reaches 90°F (32°C), add the rennet.

Make the curd

  1. Once the curd has coagulated, break it slightly and cover it with a thin cloth to drain the whey.

  2. Let the curd hang in a bag until it stops dripping, then cut it into pieces.

  3. Submerge the pieces in cold water for one hour, salting them lightly as you remove them.

Press and age

  1. Place the salted curd pieces into a vat, breaking the top slightly to help them join.

  2. Apply a small weight to prevent excess whey from escaping.

  3. Turn the cheese every three hours on the first day, then three times a day for three days, changing the cloth each time.

  4. After three days, remove the cheese from the vat and wrap it tightly, changing the bandage every 24 hours.

  5. Rub the cheese with a little salt before bandaging and wipe it daily until it dries.

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. Milk + creamtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together29,399 recipes

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

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 and provides the protein and fat that set into curd.
Sweet cream
Adds fat, which enriches the texture and makes the finished cheese creamier.
Rennet (in the method)
Enzyme that coagulates the milk into a solid curd for the cheese to form.

The step that matters

Adding the rennet at 90°F (32°C). Rennet works best within a narrow temperature range. Too cool and the curd sets slowly or weakly; too hot and the enzyme is damaged, so the curd may fail to form properly.

“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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