Name: And Cheese
Ingredients: yolk of 1 egg; parmesan cheese (or cheese of choice)

Why it works: Egg and parmesan cheese are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,368 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

And Cheese

Ingredients

yolk of 1 egg
parmesan cheese (or cheese of choice)

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

Brush the ramakins with the yolk of the egg.
Fill the ramakins with grated parmesan cheese.

Bake and serve

Bake in a 400°F (200°C) oven until golden and bubbly.
Serve warm, ideally with a cup of coffee.

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.

Egg + parmesan cheesetop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together3,368 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

Egg yolk: Brushed on the pastry to give it a golden, glossy browned finish.
Parmesan cheese: Melts and bubbles inside the pastry, providing the rich, savory 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.