Name: Rush Cream Cheese
Ingredients: equal parts cream and new milk or two-thirds cream and one-third new milk; fresh rushes or wheat straw

Why it works: Cream and wheat work together. They rank in the top 24% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 681 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-one, which smells mushroom, metallic. The science ↓

Rush Cream Cheese

Ingredients

equal parts cream and new milk or two-thirds cream and one-third new milk
fresh rushes or wheat straw

Directions

Prepare the vat

Sew rushes or wheat straw together to form a brick-shaped vat without a top or bottom.
Create two squares from the same material: one for the base and one to cover the vat.

Make the cheese

Prepare the curd using equal parts of cream and new milk or two-thirds cream and one-third new milk.
Press a half-pound weight on top of the vat.
The next day, turn out the cheese and change it daily as described.
Place fresh rushes between the cheese and the boards each time you turn it.

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.

Cream + wheattop 24% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together681 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

What each ingredient does

Cream: Provides fat, which gives the cheese a rich, soft, creamy texture.
New milk: Supplies the milk proteins and sugars that form the curd and set the cheese.
Fresh rushes or wheat straw: Forms the vat that shapes the cheese and supports it while it drains.

“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.