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Bread

Bread Cheese Cakes

Bread cheese cakes are made by soaking sliced French roll in boiling milk, mixing with eggs, butter, spices, currants, and baking in puff pastry crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,318 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Bread Cheese Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the bread

  1. Pour boiling milk over the sliced French roll and let it cool.

Make the filling

  1. In a bowl, mix the cooled bread mixture with eggs, melted butter, nutmeg, lemon extract, sugar, and currants.

Bake

  1. Pour the mixture into a prepared puff pastry crust.

  2. Bake until set and golden.

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. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

  4. Milk + nutmegtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,685 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Butter + nutmegtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together24,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

French roll
Soaked in hot milk, it softens and forms the body of the filling.
Eggs
Bind the filling and set on baking to give it a firm, sliceable texture.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture, and helps the top brown in the oven.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and aids browning on the surface.
Currants
Provide chewy pockets of sweetness spread through the filling.

The step that matters

Bake until set and golden. Eggs set as they heat, so underbaking leaves the filling runny and overbaking makes it dry and tough. Watch for a firm center and an even golden top.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, egg, butter, nutmeg, lemon, sugar):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Orangefits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, egg, butter, nutmeg, lemon, sugar. 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.

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