Why it works: Milk and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 88,785 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓
Cheese Cakes
Ingredients
Directions
Make the filling
Pour the sour milk through a sieve and use only the thick curd that remains.
Beat in the sugar, egg yolks, and flavouring to taste.
Line the case
Roll out the flaky pastry and line patty pans with it.
Fill the pastry with rice or crusts of bread and bake for about 10 minutes.
Fill, bake and serve
Remove the rice or crusts and fill the pastry with the cheese cake mixture.
Finish baking and let cool on a sieve.
Sprinkle with sugar and serve cold.
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.
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Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together88,785 recipes
Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
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Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together77,875 recipes
Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
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Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together122,807 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
- Sour milk
- Its thick curd forms the body of the cheese cake filling.
- Eggs
- Set when baked, giving the filling structure and richness.
- Sugar
- Adds sweetness to the filling and to the finished top.
- Flaky pastry
- Forms a crisp, flaky case that holds the filling.
The step that matters
Baking the empty pastry case. Weighting the pastry with rice or bread stops it puffing and shrinking, keeping the case flat. Removing the weights lets the base dry and crisp, so it does not turn soggy under the filling.
“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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