Skip to main content
Dessert

Cottage-cheese Pie

A baked pie made with cottage cheese, sugar, milk, eggs, fat, salt, vanilla, and cornstarch.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Milk and vanilla are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,187 recipes. Both carry ethyl caproate, which smells fruity, apple peel. The science ↓

Cottage-cheese Pie

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).

Make the filling

  1. In a bowl, mix cottage cheese, sugar, milk, beaten egg yolks, melted fat, salt, and vanilla.

  2. Stir cornstarch into the milk before adding to the mixture to prevent separation.

Bake

  1. Pour the mixture into a pie crust and bake until set.

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 + vanillatop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,187 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity, apple peel).

  2. Sugar + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Cottage cheese + milktop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together239 recipes

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

  4. Cottage cheese + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together601 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  5. Cottage cheese + vanillatop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together107 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity, apple peel).

Sugar and vanilla barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 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

Cottage cheese
Forms the body of the filling, giving it a creamy, sliceable texture when set.
Egg yolks
Coagulate in the oven to set the filling and add richness.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps soften the set texture of the custard.
Milk
Supplies moisture and liquid that the eggs and cornstarch bind together.
Cornstarch
Thickens the liquid so the filling holds together and resists separating.

The step that matters

Stir cornstarch into the milk before adding. Cornstarch clumps easily if added dry to the mixture. Mixing it into the milk first disperses the starch evenly, so the filling thickens smoothly and is less likely to separate.

“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.

You might also like

Vanilla Ice CreamVanilla Ice Cream108 recipesCheese BallsCheese Balls97 recipesCheese CakeCheese Cake55 recipesCream CheeseCream Cheese46 recipes