Name: Cream Cheese
Ingredients: 5 quarts of strippings (last of the milk); 2 tablespoons of rennet; coarse sea salt (formerly 'bay salt'); nettles or clean dock leaves

Why it works: Milk and dock work together. They rank in the top 29% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 18 recipes. Both carry 2-methylbutyraldehyde, which smells malty, chocolate. The science ↓

Cream Cheese

Ingredients

5 quarts of strippings (last of the milk)
2 tablespoons of rennet
coarse sea salt (formerly 'bay salt')
nettles or clean dock leaves

Directions

Make the curd

Pour 5 quarts of strippings into a pan and add 2 tablespoons of rennet.
When the curd forms, break it down 2 or 3 times with a skimming dish.
Let it stand for 2 hours.

Drain and press

Spread cheese cloth on a sieve.
Place the curd on it.
Let the whey drain.
Break the curd slightly with your hand.
Transfer it to a vat with a 2-pound weight on top.
Let it stand for 12 hours.
Remove and bind with a fillet.
Turn daily until dry.

Ripen

Cover with nettles or clean dock leaves.
Place between two pewter plates to ripen.
If the weather is warm, it will be ready in 3 weeks.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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.

Milk + docktop 29% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together18 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).

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

What each ingredient does

Strippings: Milk left at the end of milking supplies the fat and protein that form the curd.
Rennet: Enzyme that clots the milk into curd, setting the cheese's basic structure.
Coarse sea salt: Seasons the cheese and helps draw out moisture while it dries and ripens.

“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.