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Dessert

Cottage, or Dutch Cheese

A cheese made from clabber milk, seasoned with salt, pepper, butter, and sweet cream, then formed into balls and rolled in parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Cottage, or Dutch Cheese

Ingredients

Directions

Drain the curd

  1. Heat a crock of clabber milk on the back of the stove until it separates into whey and clabber, which takes several hours.

  2. Pour the mixture into a cheese-cloth bag.

  3. Hang the bag up to drain.

Season and shape

  1. Transfer the cheese to a crock.

  2. Season the cheese with coarse sea salt, black pepper, and 1 tablespoon of butter.

  3. Moisten the mixture with sweet cream.

  4. Mix the mixture with your hands.

  5. Form the cheese into two large balls or small balls the size of an egg yolk.

  6. Roll the balls slightly in chopped parsley.

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. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  4. Butter + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  5. 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

Clabber milk
Its coagulated curd forms the body of the cheese once whey drains away.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a softer, smoother texture.
Sweet cream
Adds moisture and richness, loosening the drained curd.

The step that matters

Separating the clabber on the stove. Heat should be gentle. Strong heat can toughen the milk proteins, giving a rubbery, grainy curd instead of a soft, tender one.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, pepper, butter, cream):

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Cinnamonfits about as well
  3. Parsleythe original
  4. Celeryfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, pepper, butter, cream. 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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