Home › The Principles of Cookery › Bremen Cheesecakes
Bremen Cheesecakes
Cheesecakes from this recipe are quickly prepared and at little cost. Beat well, till white, the yolks of eight eggs, and add eight ounces of finely-sifted sugar and eight ounces of sweet almonds, powdered. Line the pans with a thin paste, and put in the mixture with a little fresh butter on the top of each just before they are placed in the oven. Take care that the oven is not too hot, or the cakes will fall in cooling. Bake for about a quarter of an hour. Probable cost, 2s.
An almond tartlet filling in the older English sense of "cheesecake" — there is no cheese in it at all. The whole thing hinges on beating the yolks properly and keeping the oven gentle.
- Beat the yolks "till white"This means whipping eight yolks with a whisk or mixer until they are pale and thick enough to fall in a ribbon, several minutes by machine. That aeration is the only leavening in the filling; stir the yolks lazily and the tarts bake dense and greasy.
- Oven temperature"Not too hot" indicates a moderate oven; the book gives no figure, but something in the region of 325-350F is a reasonable modern reading. Hotter than that and the filling puffs, sets on the surface and then sinks as it cools, which is exactly the collapse the recipe warns against.
- Sweet almonds, powderedUse blanched ground almonds or almond flour, 8 oz by weight. "Sweet" almonds simply distinguishes them from bitter almonds, which older kitchens used in small quantity for flavour and which are now restricted or largely unavailable for food use in many countries.
- Finely-sifted sugarCaster sugar. Granulated will work but sift it and give the yolks longer, or the filling stays gritty over so short a bake.
- Pans and paste"Pans" are small tartlet or patty tins, roughly 2 to 2 1/2 inches across; "a thin paste" is a plain shortcrust rolled thin. This quantity of filling lines and fills about 20 to 24 of them. A brief blind bake of the shells keeps the bottoms from going soft under the wet mixture.
- The butter on topA small knob, added just before they go in, as the recipe directs. It melts into the surface and browns as they bake.
- TimingA quarter of an hour is realistic for tartlets this size. They are done when the centres are just set and barely domed — carry them further and they crack and sink.
- Probable cost2s is the shilling estimate Cassell's attached to its entries, useful for comparing recipes within the book and meaningless as a modern figure.
In English cookery books "cheesecake" long meant any small filled tartlet of the kind once made with curds, and the name outlived the ingredient: by the nineteenth century lemon cheesecakes, almond cheesecakes and rice cheesecakes all appeared under the heading with no cheese anywhere among them. This one belongs to the almond family, a close relative of the frangipane and maid-of-honour tarts that filled British pastry chapters. The German label cannot be accounted for from the recipe itself, and the attribution is conventional rather than documented. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, compiled for middle-class households with a cook or a capable mistress, sells the recipe on economy and speed, and it is genuinely both: eight yolks, sugar and ground almonds in equal weights, no custard to temper and no curd to drain.