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Cheese Sauce

A simple sauce made by thickening milk with flour and adding cottage cheese.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and cottage cheese work together. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 239 recipes. Both carry ethyl 2-methylbutyrate, which smells fruity, apple. The science ↓

Cheese Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a saucepan, thicken the milk with the flour over medium heat.

  2. Just before serving, stir in the cottage cheese until melted.

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 + cottage cheesetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together239 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl 2-methylbutyrate (fruity, apple).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Milk + peppertop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together26,984 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl 2-methylbutyrate (fruity, apple).

  5. Cottage cheese + peppertop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together393 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl 2-methylbutyrate (fruity, apple).

Milk and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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 sauce.
Flour
Its starch thickens the hot milk, giving the sauce body.
Cottage cheese
Melts into the sauce, adding creaminess and savory flavor.

The step that matters

Thicken the milk with the flour over medium heat. Flour starch must be fully dispersed in the liquid and heated so the granules swell and thicken the sauce. Added too quickly or not stirred, the flour clumps and the sauce stays lumpy and thin.

“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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