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Dessert

Cocoanut Cheesecakes

A baked coconut cheesecake made with coconut, rice flour, egg, sugar, butter, and pastry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Coconut and rice match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,063 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Cocoanut Cheesecakes

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

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

  2. Roll out the pastry very thinly and line twelve patty tins.

Make the filling

  1. In a bowl, cream the butter and sugar together.

  2. Add the egg and rice flour, and beat well.

  3. Stir in the coconut.

  4. Place a good teaspoonful of the mixture into each patty tin.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake for 10 to 16 minutes.

  2. Serve hot or cold.

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. Coconut + ricetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,063 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Coconut + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,467 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Coconut
Provides the bulk and chewy texture of the filling, and its flavour.
Egg
Binds the mixture and sets it as it bakes, giving the filling structure.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, creaming with sugar to lighten the mixture slightly.
Caster sugar
Sweetens the filling and helps it brown lightly in the oven.
Rice flour
Adds a little structure to the filling so it holds its shape when baked.

Swap the coconut

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Coconutthe original
  4. Figfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, flour, egg, sugar, butter. 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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