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Dessert

Apple Cheese

A sweet apple preserve made with sugar, lemon, and a creamy egg yolk mixture.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Apple and peach match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 303 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Apple Cheese

Ingredients

Directions

Make the apple base

  1. Weigh the apples and use the same weight of sugar.

  2. Boil the sugar in a small amount of water and skim until clear.

  3. Add the apples, lemon juice, and grated lemon peel to the sugar mixture.

  4. Boil until thick, then pour into a greased mold to cool.

Make the cream

  1. For the cream, mix the egg yolks with boiled milk and ground rice.

  2. Add peach leaves or your preferred flavoring and bring to a boil.

  3. Sweeten to taste and let it cool.

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. Apple + peachtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together303 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  2. Milk + ricetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,374 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Milk + peachtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together781 recipes

    Shared aroma: phellandrene (minty).

  4. Rice + peachtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together171 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  5. Apple + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,104 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

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

What each ingredient does

Apples
Provide the fruit body and flavor of the cheese once cooked down and thickened.
Sugar
Sweetens the apples and helps the mixture thicken into a firm, sliceable set.
Egg yolks
Enrich the cream and help it thicken as it heats.
Ground rice
Thickens the milk mixture so the cream holds its body.
Milk
Forms the base of the cream, adding richness and a soft texture.

The step that matters

Boil the apple mixture until thick. Pectin in apples sets only when enough sugar and acid are concentrated by boiling. Stopping too early leaves a loose mass that will not hold its shape in the mold.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, apple, egg, milk, rice, peach):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Apricotfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, apple, egg, milk, rice, peach. 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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