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Cheesecakes, Lemon
Rub the peel of two large lemons with half a pound of loaf sugar. Whisk six eggs thoroughly, add the sugar pounded, and the juice of one lemon. Melt half a pound of butter in a saucepan, with five table-spoonfuls of cream, add the other ingredients, and stir the mixture over the fire until it begins to thicken. When cold, fill the tartlet-tins, previously lined with good puff paste, a little more than half full, and bake them in a quick oven for fifteen or twenty minutes. Probable cost, 2d. each. Sufficient for four dozen cheesecakes.
This is a lemon curd, cooked on the stove and then baked in puff-pastry cases — Victorian "cheesecakes" contain no cheese at all. The filling is where it succeeds or fails.
- Do not let the filling boilCook it over low heat, or in a bowl set over simmering water, stirring constantly until it coats the spoon. Six eggs with only five tablespoons of cream will scramble if the pan gets much above 180F.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was a hard cone of refined sugar, broken off and crushed as needed — hence "pounded" in the next sentence. Ordinary granulated sugar works; use 8 oz (225 g).
- Rubbing the peelRubbing a sugar lump over the lemon strips the oil out of the zest, which carries far more perfume than the juice. Finely grated zest from two lemons stirred into the sugar gives the same result.
- A quick ovenUsually taken to mean roughly 400-450F (200-230C). At that heat the puff paste rises and sets before the custard overcooks; fifteen to twenty minutes is right for small tins.
- CreamThe recipe says only 'cream', which in a Victorian English kitchen would have been a rich cream rather than a thin one. Heavy or whipping cream is the closest equivalent; single cream or half-and-half will make a looser filling.
- Filling the tins'a little more than half full' is deliberate. The pastry lining climbs as it bakes and the custard swells slightly; filled higher, they overflow and weld themselves to the tin.
- YieldFour dozen small tartlets, which suits a Victorian tea table more than a modern one. Scaling to a third — two eggs and a third of everything else — gives about sixteen.
Calling a sweet, curd-filled tartlet a cheesecake is older than the omission of the cheese: medieval and Tudor cheesecakes really were made with fresh curds, and as cooks began thickening the filling with eggs, butter and sugar instead, the name stayed put. By the time Cassell's was compiled in the 1870s and 1880s, English cookery books listed whole ranks of cheesecakes — lemon, almond, orange, rice, potato. The filling is what a later generation would sell in jars as lemon curd, and it is telling that the recipe cooks the mixture first and only then bakes it.