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Dessert

Country Cheesecakes

A curd-based cheesecake flavored with currants, sugar, nutmeg, lemon rind, and wine or brandy, baked in puff pastry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,318 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Country Cheesecakes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the curd

  1. Curdle the milk with rennet to make curd.

  2. Strain the curd, then rub it through a colander.

Make the filling

  1. Mix the curd with butter, cream, currants, sugar, nutmeg, lemon rind, beaten eggs, and wine or brandy.

Fill and bake

  1. Line patty pans with puff pastry.

  2. Fill the lined pans with the curd mixture.

  3. Put bars of pastry across the top.

  4. Bake for 20 minutes.

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. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  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. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  5. Cream + nutmegtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,920 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Bind the filling and help it set into a firm, sliceable custard when baked.
Butter
Adds richness and a tender, smooth texture to the curd filling.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and helps it brown lightly in the oven.
Currants
Add chewy pockets of fruit sweetness through the filling.
Milk
Forms the curd that makes up the body of the filling.

The step that matters

Fill and bake. Egg-rich curd filling sets as it heats, so overbaking can make it dry, grainy, or cracked. Pastry must be lined before filling so the base bakes crisp rather than soggy.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, butter, cream, sugar, nutmeg, lemon, egg):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Coconutfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, butter, cream, sugar, nutmeg, lemon, egg. 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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