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Carrot Cheesecakes
Boil a moderate-sized carrot until tender. Pound it in a mortar, and pass the pulp through a fine hair sieve. Mix with it an ounce of oiled butter, two dessert-spoonfuls of washed currants, two table-spoonfuls of sugar, half a nutmeg grated, a table-spoonful of fresh curd, and a well-beaten egg. Line some patty-pans with good puff paste, half fill them with the mixture, and bake in a good oven for twenty minutes. Probable cost, about 1d. each.
These are not cheesecake in the modern sense but small curd tarts in puff pastry, sweetened and spiced, with boiled carrot standing in for most of the cheese. The mixture is thin enough to rise and set, so the pans are only half filled.
- "Cheesecakes" means little tartsVictorian cheesecakes are individual pastry cases with a curd-and-egg filling, baked and eaten like jam tarts. Nothing here is chilled, and there is no biscuit base.
- Patty-pansUse a 12-hole shallow bun or tartlet tin, not a deep muffin tin. Cut rounds of puff pastry a little larger than the holes and press them in without stretching.
- Fresh curdThis was milk set with rennet and drained, the same curd used for lemon cheesecakes. Full-fat ricotta or a well-drained curd cheese is the closest substitute; a tablespoon is a small quantity and its job is texture rather than flavour.
- Oiled butterButter melted gently until it runs clear, not browned. An ounce is 2 tablespoons.
- Oven temperature"A good oven" for puff paste means a brisk heat; roughly 400-425F is a reasonable modern equivalent. Twenty minutes at that heat should set the filling and colour the pastry; if the tops are browning before the centres firm, drop to 375F for the last few minutes.
- NutmegHalf a whole nutmeg grated is roughly 1 to 1.5 teaspoons and will dominate everything else. A quarter of a nutmeg, about half to three-quarters of a teaspoon, is nearer modern taste.
- Sieving the carrotPounding and passing through a hair sieve was the usual way to get a smooth pulp. A food processor or a potato ricer does the same work; the pulp should be dry, so drain the boiled carrot well.
- YieldAbout twelve small tarts. They are best warm on the day they are baked, since puff pastry under a moist filling softens quickly.
Carrots in sweet baking are older than they look modern: English cookery used them as a sweetener and bulking agent in puddings and tarts long before sugar was cheap, and carrot pudding appears in printed receipt books from the seventeenth century onward. The word "cheesecake" in a book like Cassell's covers a whole family of small curd tarts -- lemon, almond, orange, potato, carrot -- in which the curd is often the smallest ingredient and the name survives from the original cheese-based version. The costing of "about 1d. each" is characteristic of Cassell's, which pitched itself at households keeping close accounts, and it tells you why a boiled carrot and a spoonful of curd were worth stretching into a dozen tarts.