Name: Clarified Milk Whey
Ingredients: 6 pints whey; 3 egg whites; ½ teaspoon cream of tartar

Why it works: Whey and cream work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 36 recipes. Both carry acetic acid, which smells sour, vinegar. The science ↓

Clarified Milk Whey

Ingredients

6 pints whey
3 egg whites
½ teaspoon cream of tartar

Directions

Prepare 6 pints of whey as in the first recipe.
Add the egg whites and cream of tartar.
Boil the mixture and filter it through a clean cloth.

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.

Whey + creamtop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together36 recipes

Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).
Egg + creamtop 24% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together42,166 recipes

Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).
Whey + eggtop 25% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together38 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

Egg and cream barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 42,166 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Egg whites: Coagulate when boiled, trapping suspended solids so they can be filtered out clear.
Cream of tartar: Stabilises the egg whites and helps them bind impurities as the mixture heats.

“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.