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Apple Cheesecakes
Pare and core half a pound of apples, and stew them with half a pound of sugar, the finely-chopped rind of a lemon, and a tea-cupful of water. Melt three ounces of butter; take five eggs, leave out the whites of two, beat them well, and mix all thoroughly together. Bake for a quarter of an hour in patty-pans lined with puff paste. Allow one cake for each person. Probable cost, 1s., without the puff paste.
A Victorian curd tart in everything but the curd: stewed apple, butter and egg bound into a lemon-scented filling and baked in small pastry cases. Two details decide whether it works.
- Cool the apple firstFive beaten eggs stirred into hot apple pulp will scramble on contact. Stew the apples down, let the mixture drop to lukewarm, then beat in the melted butter and eggs.
- Reduce the apples properlyHalf a pound of apples with a teacupful of water (roughly 5 fl oz) needs to be cooked until thick and pulpy, not merely soft. A loose filling will soak the pastry base and never set.
- Patty-pansShallow tartlet or bun tins, close to a modern 12-hole bun tray rather than a deep muffin tin. Line each with puff pastry; the recipe gives no yield, only the instruction to allow one cake for each person.
- The eggsFive eggs less two whites means three whole eggs and two yolks. Victorian eggs were ungraded and often ran smaller than a modern large egg, so a scant reading is safer than a generous one.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. Puff pastry tartlets of this size want a hot oven, 400-425F, so the pastry lifts before the custard sets; a quarter of an hour is about right at that heat.
- SugarHalf a pound of sugar to half a pound of apples is very sweet by current taste, and Victorian cooking apples were sharper than most eating apples sold now. Bramleys or another tart cooker will carry it; with sweet dessert apples, cut the sugar by a third.
- Lemon rind"Finely-chopped rind" means the yellow zest only, pared and then chopped as fine as possible. Grating or fine zesting gives a better texture than the original chopping.
- CostThe shilling is the ingredient cost in period money and has no modern equivalent worth quoting; note only that the puff paste is expressly excluded from the figure.
Cheesecakes of this sort contain no cheese, and the name is a survival rather than a mistake. The English cheesecake began as a tart of fresh curds, sugar, butter and eggs, and by the eighteenth century cooks were making the same small pastries with lemon, almonds or fruit standing in for the curd while the name stayed put; lemon cheesecakes and almond cheesecakes appear in recipe books long before Cassell's. What survives here is the shape and the binding rather than the dairy: butter and egg thickening a sweetened fruit pulp in a puff-paste case, one to a person. Cassell's Dictionary, generally taken to have been compiled for middle-class households, is characteristically brisk about it and gives the probable cost, a feature that runs through the whole book and tells you as much about its readers as the recipe does about the dish.