Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓
Cheese Cakes
Ingredients
Directions
Make the curd
Pour 2 quarts of New Milk into a stew-pan and heat it near the fire.
Stir in 2 tablespoons of rennet and let it sit until set, about 1 hour.
Break the curd with your hand and let it sit for another 30 minutes.
Pour off the whey and place the curd in a colander to drain until dry.
Finish the cheese cake
Transfer the dry curd to a mortar and pound it until smooth.
Add 4 ounces of pounded and sifted sugar and 3 ounces of fresh butter.
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.
Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it
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.
-
Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together81,283 recipes
Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).
-
Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together98,233 recipes
Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).
-
Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together77,875 recipes
Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Milk and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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
- New milk
- Forms the curd that becomes the body of the cheese cake.
- Rennet
- Enzyme that coagulates the milk proteins so the milk sets into curd.
- Sugar
- Adds sweetness and balances the mild, tangy flavour of the curd.
- Fresh butter
- Adds fat, making the pounded curd richer and softer in texture.
The step that matters
Breaking the curd before draining. Breaking the set curd releases whey and gives the curd a uniform texture; if it is left whole or handled roughly, drainage is uneven and the cake can turn out wet or crumbly.
“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.
More cheese cake recipes
You might also like
White Cake431 recipes
Pound Cake373 recipes
Orange Bundt Cake349 recipes
Spice Cake344 recipesThe free Flavor Lab newsletter: one surprising pairing a week and the molecular reason it works, in 60 seconds. No spam, unsubscribe anytime.
Prefer an account? Create a free account to save pairings and unlock the full chemistry.