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Cheese Fondue

A baked cheese mixture made with milk, butter, flour, salt, pepper, grated cheese, and eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Cheese Fondue

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Boil 1 pint of milk with 1 tablespoon of butter.

  2. Dissolve 2 tablespoons of flour in a little cold milk and stir it into the boiling milk.

  3. Remove from heat and let cool, then season with salt and pepper.

Add cheese and eggs

  1. Add 5 ounces of grated cheese and 4 beaten eggs to the mixture, and mix well.

Bake and serve

  1. Pour the mixture into a buttered dish and bake for 20 minutes.

  2. Serve immediately as it will fall.

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

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

  2. Butter + cheesetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,962 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Milk + cheesetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,426 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Milk
Forms the liquid base that the flour thickens into a smooth sauce.
Flour
Thickens the hot milk into a sauce as its starch swells and sets.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a softer, smoother texture.
Cheese
Melts into the sauce, adding flavor, fat and a stretchy body.
Eggs
Set during baking to give the dish its structure and firmness.

The step that matters

Serve immediately as it will fall.. The eggs set around trapped air and steam while baking. As the dish cools, that air and steam contract, so the structure sinks and loses height.

“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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