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Cheesecakes, Chester
Line some patty-pans with rich short pastry, and nearly fill with the following compound. Mix four ounces of flour with two ounces of sifted sugar; add by degrees two ounces of butter beaten to a cream, and three well-beaten eggs; flavour with vanilla. Bake in a fairly hot oven for ten minutes. Probable cost, 1s.
A tartlet, not a cheesecake in the modern sense: the filling is a plain creamed-butter sponge batter baked in a pastry case. A few of the Victorian conventions need translating.
- Patty-pansShallow tartlet tins of about 2 to 2½ inches across — a 12-hole bun or muffin tin does the job. The recipe gives no pastry quantity; the filling alone would fill roughly a dozen small tins.
- "Fairly hot oven"Around 375–400F. The recipe's ten minutes suits shallow tins at that heat; the filling should be set and lightly domed, and it will sink slightly as it cools.
- Mixing orderAs written you add creamed butter and eggs to dry flour and sugar, which invites lumps. Cream the butter with the sugar first, beat in the eggs a little at a time, then fold in the flour — the finished batter is the same and behaves better.
- WeightsFour ounces flour is about one cup, two ounces sugar about ¼ cup, two ounces butter half a stick. Three eggs is a lot of liquid for that little flour, which is the point: the filling should be pourable rather than stiff.
- Flavouring"Flavour with vanilla" could mean essence, vanilla sugar or an infused pod. A teaspoon of extract suits the quantity.
- Rich short pastryUsually a butter-rich shortcrust, often sweetened and sometimes bound with an egg yolk. Line the tins and chill them while you mix the filling — cold pastry holds its shape against a wet batter.
- Filling depthLeave the headroom the recipe asks for: the egg-rich batter rises and can run over the pastry rim if the cases are brimmed.
- Probable costOne shilling. "Probable cost" is a standing feature of the book's entries. It has no modern equivalent worth quoting; treat it as a note on the book's method rather than a measurement.
By the time Cassell's was compiled, the English "cheesecake" had largely parted company with cheese. The dish began as a curd tart — fresh curds beaten with eggs, butter and sugar in a pastry case — but through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries cooks kept the name, the small pastry case and the rich egg filling while dropping the curd, producing lemon cheesecakes, almond cheesecakes and plain ones like this that are essentially a baked sponge batter in short pastry. Richmond maids of honour and the surviving Yorkshire curd tart kept the curd where other versions abandoned it. Regional labels such as "Chester" attached loosely to these tartlets in Victorian cookery dictionaries and often mark a variation in the filling rather than any documented local origin.