Make a rich biscuit dough; roll out and place on a well-buttered pie-dish. Then mix ½ pound of cottage cheese with a pinch of salt, ¼ cup of melted butter, ½ cup of sugar, ½ lemon grated, 2 yolks of eggs and ½ cup of currants; add the whites beaten stiff. Fill the pie with the cheese. Serve hot or cold with coffee.
A one-crust quark tart translated for American pantries, written for cooks who already knew how long a custard tart wanted in the oven. The gaps worth filling are the cheese, the oven and the timing.
- The cheese is the hingeOrdinary wet-curd supermarket cottage cheese will weep and leave the filling loose. Use dry-curd cottage cheese, farmer cheese or quark; if only creamed cottage cheese is at hand, drain it in a sieve for an hour and press it through the mesh so the curds break down.
- "A rich biscuit dough"In 1900s American usage this is a baking-powder biscuit dough enriched with butter and often an egg, not a British sweet biscuit. Roughly 2 cups flour, 2 teaspoons baking powder, ½ teaspoon salt, 6 tablespoons butter and enough milk to bind; roll thin, since it puffs.
- No oven temperature is givenBake at 350F. The filling is a light custard and will crack or curdle above about 375F; it is done when the centre barely trembles, usually 40 to 50 minutes.
- CurrantsDried Zante currants, not fresh redcurrants or blackcurrants. Plumping them for ten minutes in warm water or lemon juice keeps them from scorching against the hot dish wall.
- "½ lemon grated"The zest of half a lemon, grated fine. Taken literally as half a whole grated lemon the pith would turn the filling bitter.
- Folding the whitesTwo whites beaten stiff are the only lift this filling has. Fold them in at the last moment and get the tart into the oven immediately, or the batter deflates and bakes dense.
- Dish and yieldA 9-inch pie plate, well buttered as instructed. It serves six to eight, and like most cheese tarts it slices more cleanly cold than hot.
This is Käsekuchen as Bavaria and Austria make it, where the filling is built on quark or Topfen, a fresh curd cheese, rather than the cream cheese that later came to define the American cheesecake. Cottage cheese stands in here, dry curd being the closest thing an American grocer was likely to supply. The base of biscuit dough rather than pastry is another domestication: a quick dough raised with baking powder, faster than the yeasted Hefeteig or the Mürbeteig a Munich baker would have used. The closing line "serve hot or cold with coffee" places the dish accurately, since Käsekuchen belongs to the afternoon Kaffee und Kuchen rather than to the end of dinner, and the book is a calendar of one dish a day drawn from around the world.