Line a pie-plate with a rich pie-dough. Mix 1 cup of cottage cheese with 1 tablespoonful of butter, ¼ cup of sugar, 2 eggs, a pinch of salt and a few currants. Mix well. Fill the pie. Sprinkle with sugar and cinnamon and bake until light brown. Serve hot or cold.
July 13 — No. 13
German
A one-line German cheesecake in the American idiom: a single crust, a soft cheese custard, no water bath. The original gives no oven temperature and no time, so the two things worth fixing are heat and moisture.
- Oven and timeThe recipe gives no temperature or time. A moderate oven, around 375F, for roughly 35 to 45 minutes suits it. The filling is set when the outer inch is firm and the centre still trembles slightly; it finishes setting as it cools.
- Drain the cheeseThis is the hinge. Modern supermarket cottage cheese carries far more free whey than the drained curd cheese a 1900s cook would have used, and undrained curd gives a weepy, cracked filling. Drain it in a sieve for an hour, or press it in a cloth, and sieve or blend it smooth unless you want a curdy texture.
- What cheese to buyFarmer's cheese, quark, or dry-curd cottage cheese are all closer to the intent than creamed small-curd cottage cheese. If you use the creamed kind, drain it and leave out any liquid entirely.
- CurrantsThese are dried Zante currants, the small black raisins, not fresh redcurrants or blackcurrants. A tablespoon or two is enough; plumping them in warm water for ten minutes keeps them from scorching on the surface.
- SugarA quarter cup for a full pie is restrained by present-day standards. If you want it sweeter, go to a third or half a cup rather than more, or the custard loosens.
- The crustA rich pie-dough here means a short pastry high in fat. Since the filling releases moisture, a 10-minute blind bake at 400F before filling helps keep the base from going soft.
- YieldProbably a 9-inch pie plate, six servings or so. Cold is arguably the better of the two options the recipe offers, after several hours in the refrigerator.
German cheese pies of this kind descend from Käsekuchen, the fresh-curd cheesecake made across German-speaking Europe with Quark rather than the cream cheese that came to dominate American versions later. What distinguishes it from a New York cheesecake is the cheese itself: a drained, slightly acidic curd, sweetened lightly and lifted with whole eggs, so the result eats more like a baked custard tart than a dense confection. The instruction to use cottage cheese rather than name Quark is a reminder that the American dairy case of the period offered a drier, more crumbly curd than the tub sold under the same name now.