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Dessert

Cheese Cake

A custard-like cheesecake made with curds, eggs, milk, and butter baked in a pie crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 Cake

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. Line a pie plate with the pie crust, rolling it out very thin.

Make the curds

  1. Heat the milk to blood-warmth and mix in the rennet.

  2. When curds form, drain them in a bag like ordinary pot cheese.

  3. Beat the curds in a bowl until fine.

Bake

  1. Add the eggs, sugar, creamed butter, salt, nutmeg, and orange peel (if using) to the curds and mix well.

  2. Pour the mixture into the lined pie plate.

  3. Bake for about the same time as a custard pie.

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. Nutmeg + orangetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,746 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Milk + orangetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,696 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  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

Milk
Forms the curds that give the cheesecake its body.
Rennet
Enzyme that coagulates the warm milk into curds.
Eggs
Add structure and set the filling as it bakes.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps soften the curd texture.
Creamed butter
Adds fat for richness and a smoother, moister texture.

The step that matters

Baking for the same time as a custard pie. Baking too long or too hot can overcook the egg proteins, making the filling grainy, weepy, or cracked. Bake until the centre is just set and still slightly wobbly, since it firms as it cools.

Swap the orange

The recipe marks orange as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, egg, sugar, butter, nutmeg):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Lemonfits better
  4. Orangethe original

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

Lemon 96Almond 47Rice 25Apple 21Curd 14Orange 14 See all 71 →

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