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Cheesecakes, Home-Made
Put four well-beaten eggs into a saucepan containing a pint of boiling milk, and let it remain on the fire until it curdles. Pour off the whey, and put the curd on an inverted sieve to drain. When it is quite dry, add two table-spoonfuls of sugar, a little salt, six ounces of carefully-washed currants, a piece of butter about the size of an egg, melted, two spoonfuls of rose-water or cream, and half a tea-spoonful of pounded cinnamon. Line the tartlet-tins with good puff paste, three-parts fill them with the mixture, and bake in a good oven. Time to bake, twenty minutes. Probable cost, 1d. each. Sufficient for two dozen cheesecakes.
This is a curd tart in the old English sense: you make fresh curd from milk and egg in a saucepan, drain it, then enrich and bake it in pastry. Nothing here is difficult, but the curd stage decides everything.
- The hinge: draining the curdOnce the milk curdles, pour off the whey and let the curd drain until it stops dripping altogether — the book says "quite dry" and means it. A wet curd gives you a loose, weeping filling that soaks the pastry base.
- Making the curdBring the pint (about 570 ml) of milk to a boil and stir in the beaten eggs, keeping the pan on the heat until it separates into curds and whey, as the book directs. Whole milk works best; heavily heat-treated milk may curdle less readily.
- "A good oven"The book gives no temperature. For puff paste and a twenty-minute bake, a fairly hot oven — somewhere around 400°F (200°C) — is a reasonable modern reading; too low and the pastry goes pale and greasy.
- CurrantsDried Zante currants, not fresh redcurrants or blackcurrants. "Carefully-washed" mattered when dried fruit arrived gritty and stalky; modern packets need only a rinse and a pat dry, or a brief soak if they are hard.
- Butter the size of an eggRoughly 2 oz (55–60 g). Melt it and stir it in while the curd is still warm so it distributes rather than seizing into flecks.
- Rose-water or creamTwo spoonfuls of rose-water is a lot by modern palates, and modern rose essences and extracts can be much stronger than distilled rose-water. Start with a teaspoon and taste, or take the cream option, which gives a plainer curd tart.
- Tins and fillingShallow tartlet or patty tins, lined with puff pastry and filled only three-quarters full; the egg-rich curd rises a little and will spill over if you overfill. A 12-hole bun tin run twice is the nearest modern equivalent.
- YieldTwo dozen small cheesecakes. They are best the day they are baked, and should be kept refrigerated once cool since the filling is essentially fresh cheese and egg.
"Cheesecake" in British cookery long meant a small tart filled with fresh curd rather than the soft, unbaked, cream-cheese confection the word now suggests in most kitchens; it belongs to the same family as the Yorkshire curd tart and the "maid of honour", a pastry often said to have royal origins though the association is traditional rather than documented. The distinguishing feature is that the cook makes the cheese as part of the recipe, curdling milk with beaten egg to get a curd at home. Currants, rose-water and pounded cinnamon are a much older flavour combination than the book's own date, carried down from medieval and Tudor sweet-spiced baking, and their survival here shows how conservative tart fillings remained. The costing of a penny each is typical of Cassell's, which priced almost every dish so that a household could weigh a recipe against its weekly budget.