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Dessert

Cheese Pastry

A pastry filled with grated cheese, seasoned with lemon juice, cayenne, and white pepper, baked until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Cheese Pastry

Oven, in the book's wordsA good oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a good oven”. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare the pastry

  1. Roll out the pastry as thin as possible.

  2. Sprinkle the pastry lightly with lemon juice.

  3. Strew the grated cheese over the pastry.

  4. Dust with cayenne and white pepper.

  5. Fold the pastry, roll it out again to the original length, then fold and roll once more.

Shape and bake

  1. Cut into desired shapes with a cutter.

  2. Brush with egg wash and bake in a preheated oven at 400°F (200°C) until golden brown.

  3. Serve hot.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Lemon + white peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,658 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Cheese + peppertop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,861 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Pepper + white peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,478 recipes

    Shared aroma: piperonal (bitter, coconut).

  5. Cheese + lemontop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,154 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Puff or flaky pastry
Its layers of fat and dough puff and separate in the oven, giving a flaky texture.
Grated cheese
Melts and browns during baking, adding savoury flavour and golden colour.
Parmesan
Browns well and adds a sharp, salty flavour to the pastry.
Lemon juice
Adds a small amount of acidity that brightens the savoury flavour of the cheese.

The step that matters

Roll out the pastry as thin as possible. Thin pastry bakes crisp and flaky, because the layers of fat create steam that lifts them apart; thick dough turns heavy and doughy.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cheese, lemon, pepper):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cheese, lemon, pepper. 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.

More cheese pastry recipes

Cayenne 3 See all 4 →

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