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Dessert

Potato Cheesecakes

A baked potato and cheese mixture with lemon and nutmeg, topped with powdered sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and nutmeg 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 ↓

Potato Cheesecakes

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a quick oven”. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare the filling

  1. Rub the boiled potato through a sieve.

  2. Mix in the grated lemon rind, lemon juice, nutmeg, powdered sugar, and melted butter.

  3. Beat in the eggs until well combined.

Bake and serve

  1. Line patty pans and fill them three-quarters full with the mixture.

  2. Sprinkle a little powdered sugar on top.

  3. Bake in a 400°F (200°C) oven until golden.

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. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

  2. Potato + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,052 recipes

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

  3. Potato + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,230 recipes

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

  4. Potato + buttertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,456 recipes

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

  5. Nutmeg + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together24,377 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

Boiled potato
Adds body and a soft, moist crumb to the filling.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and set during baking to give structure.
Melted butter
Adds richness and fat, tenderising the texture and helping browning.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens the filling and helps the surface brown in the oven.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and balances the sweetness.

The step that matters

Beat in the eggs until well combined. Eggs set when heated and give the cakes their structure. If they are unevenly mixed, pockets of unset egg or uneven texture can form, so the batter should be smooth before filling the pans.

Swap the potato

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Sweet potatofits better
  3. Arrowrootfits better
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, nutmeg, sugar, butter, 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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