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Dessert

Fresh Cheese

A simple fresh cheese made by curdling milk with rennet, seasoning with salt and nutmeg, and draining in a cloth.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and nutmeg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,685 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Fresh Cheese

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the milk

  1. Let the fresh milk sit for 1-2 days to thicken, stirring occasionally.

  2. Sweeten the milk to taste.

  3. Grate in a little nutmeg.

  4. Add a pinch of salt.

Make and drain the curd

  1. Add a little rennet to turn the milk into a very soft curd.

  2. Pour the curd into a thin cloth laid in a sieve to drain.

  3. Form the curd in the dish you will serve it in after draining.

  4. Let it sit until ready to serve.

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. Milk + nutmegtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,685 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

New milk
Forms the body of the cheese as its proteins set into curd.
Rennet
Causes the milk to coagulate into a very soft curd.

The step that matters

Adding the rennet. Too little or too much rennet, or uneven mixing, can leave the milk unset or give a rubbery curd. A small amount, added evenly, sets the milk gently into a soft curd that drains well.

“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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