Mix 1 cup of cottage cheese with 1 tablespoonful of cream, 1 tablespoonful of flour, 1 tablespoonful of butter, 3 tablespoonfuls of sugar, the yolks of 3 eggs, and a pinch of salt and cinnamon. Mix all together with the whites beaten stiff; then line muffin-rings with a rich pastry-dough; fill with the cheese and bake in a moderate oven until brown.
A small cheese tart of the Central European type, closer to a Topfentörtchen than to anything called cheesecake in America. The recipe assumes a drier curd and a baker who knows how far to fill a shell, so those are the two things worth settling before you start.
- The cheese is the hingePeriod cottage cheese was a dry-pressed curd, much closer to today's farmer cheese, quark or dry-curd cottage cheese than to the wet, creamed tubs now sold. Modern cottage cheese will need draining in a sieve or cheesecloth for several hours, or the filling will weep and soak the pastry.
- Moderate ovenAround 350F. At that heat small tartlets take roughly 25 to 30 minutes to set and colour.
- Muffin-ringsPlain metal rings set on a baking sheet. A standard 12-cup muffin tin or individual tartlet tins does the same job; line each with pastry the way you would for small pies.
- Rich pastry-doughThe recipe does not specify. A sweetened short dough of the pate sucree or Murbeteig type, with butter, a little sugar and egg, will hold its shape against a wet filling better than a lean crust does.
- Folding the whitesBeat the yolk mixture smooth first, then fold the stiff whites in last with a light hand. The recipe's single tablespoon of flour is all the structure there is, so the air in the whites is doing the lifting.
- Fill lowTwo-thirds full at most. These souffle slightly in the oven and sink as they cool, and an overfilled ring runs over the edge and welds itself to the pan.
- YieldA dozen or so small tarts, depending on the size of the rings. Best eaten the day they are made, barely warm or at room temperature.
Vienna's cheese pastries are built on Topfen — the fresh, sharp-tasting pressed curd sold across Austria, Bohemia and Hungary and known further north as quark. The style of small sweet curd tart in this recipe belongs to the same family as the Austrian Topfentascherl and the Bohemian koláč, all of them using a fresh unripened cheese that keeps only a few days and so was baked up quickly rather than aged. Its appearance in a day-by-day American book of international recipes reflects a publishing fashion of the early twentieth century for cosmopolitan home cooking, in which each day's page took the reader to a different country; the compilers seem to have assumed an American cook would have cottage cheese in the house and would accept it as a reasonable stand-in for Topfen, which is broadly true if it is drained hard first.