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Plain Cottage Cheese

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Cucumber and horseradish match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 640 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Plain Cottage Cheese

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Season the cottage cheese with coarse sea salt to taste.

  2. Pack the seasoned cheese into a buttered earthen or enamel dish.

  3. Chill the dish until firm.

  4. Turn the cheese out onto a platter and slice it like cold veal loaf.

  5. For variations, mix in any combination of nut meats, pimientos, green peppers, cucumbers, horseradish, onion juice, or parsley.

  6. For a meat variation, mix in finely ground leftover ham or corned beef and season with made mustard before serving.

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. Cucumber + horseradishtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together640 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  2. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  3. Horseradish + parsleytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together562 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Horseradish + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,784 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Cucumber + parsleytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,564 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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

Swap the cucumber

The recipe marks cucumber as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cottage cheese, butter, meat, pepper, horseradish, onion, parsley):

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Potatofits better
  4. Cucumberthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cottage cheese, butter, meat, pepper, horseradish, onion, parsley. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

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