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Dessert

Peach Cheese

A preserved peach cheese made by baking peaches, blending with sugar, and setting in arrowroot molds.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Peach and arrowroot share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Peach Cheese

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the peaches

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. Place the peaches in a stone jar and bake until soft, or boil the jar in a kettle of water.

  3. Remove the stones and rub the peaches through a colander while hot.

Make the cheese

  1. In a preserving pan, combine the pulp and juice with 1½ times the weight of sugar.

  2. Simmer gently, skimming off any scum.

  3. Add the blanched peach kernels and stir well before removing from heat.

  4. Pour the mixture into molds dusted with arrowroot and let it dry.

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. Peach + arrowroottop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together19 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Peach + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,308 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Sugar + arrowroottop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,073 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

What each ingredient does

Ripe peaches
Provide the main fruit pulp, flavour and natural pectin for the set.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and, when cooked down, helps the mixture thicken and keep.
Blanched peach kernels
Add a subtle almond-like aroma and nutty flavour to the cheese.
Arrowroot
Dusted on the molds so the cheese releases cleanly and does not stick.

The step that matters

Simmering the pulp with sugar. Cook gently and skim off scum so the mixture thickens into a firm, clear paste. Too little cooking leaves it soft and wet, while overheating can scorch the sugar and darken the flavour.

Swap the arrowroot

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (peach, sugar):

  1. Sweet potatofits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Beetrootfits about as well
  4. Arrowrootthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against peach, sugar. 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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