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Dessert

Curds and Cream

Curds and Cream is a dish of milk curdled with rennet or gallino, drained, and served with cream, sugar, wine, and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Curds and Cream

Why it works: Buttermilk and sugar match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,973 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Curds and Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Make the curd

  1. Warm the milk in a pan and add rennet or gallino.

  2. Once the curd forms, ladle it into a perforated earthen shape.

  3. Allow the whey to drain without breaking or pressing the curd.

  4. For a lighter curd, turn it after 2 hours; for a firmer curd, squeeze it and let it sit longer.

Serve

  1. Serve with cream, sugar, wine, and lemon.

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.

  1. Buttermilk + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,973 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

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

  3. Buttermilk + creamtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together674 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Wine + lemontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,157 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Milk
Forms the body of the curd once coagulated by rennet or gallino.
Rennet or gallino
Coagulating enzymes that set the milk into a soft curd.
Buttermilk
Adds tangy acidity and aids curd formation, amount adjusted to desired sourness.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, fatty mouthfeel when served with the curd.

The step that matters

Draining the curd without breaking it. Handling the forming curd gently keeps it tender. Breaking or pressing it early lets whey escape unevenly, which makes the texture grainy and the curd crumble instead of setting smoothly.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, buttermilk, cream, sugar, wine):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Strawberryfits better
  3. Raspberryfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, buttermilk, cream, sugar, wine. 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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