Name: Cream Cheese
Ingredients: 5 quarts of strippings (the last of the milk); 2 tablespoons of rennet; coarse sea salt (to taste); nettles or clean dock leaves (for covering)

Why it works: Milk and dock work together. They rank in the top 29% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 18 recipes. Both carry 2-methylbutyraldehyde, which smells malty, chocolate. The science ↓

Cream Cheese

Ingredients

5 quarts of strippings (the last of the milk)
2 tablespoons of rennet
coarse sea salt (to taste)
nettles or clean dock leaves (for covering)

Directions

Make the curd

Pour 5 quarts of strippings into a pan and add 2 tablespoons of rennet.
When the curd forms, break it down 2 or 3 times with a skimming dish.
Let it stand for 2 hours, then spread cheese cloth on a sieve and place the curd on it to drain the whey.

Press and ripen

Break the curd slightly with your hand and transfer it to a vat, placing a 2-pound weight on top.
Let it stand for 12 hours, then remove and bind with a fillet.
Turn daily until dry, covering with nettles or clean dock leaves, and place between two pewter plates to ripen.
If the weather is warm, it will be ready in 3 weeks.

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.

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 + docktop 29% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together18 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).

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

What each ingredient does

Strippings: Milk left at the end of milking, rich in fat and protein, forms the curd that becomes the cheese.
Rennet: Enzyme that sets the milk into a firm curd, separating it from the whey.

“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.