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Cheesecakes, Potato
Grate the thin rind of two lemons, then pound them well with two table-spoonfuls of finely-sifted sugar, and three ounces of potato which has been boiled until it has become floury. Stir a couple of ounces of clarified butter in with the mixture, and when smooth add the yolks of two and the white of one egg. Line the tartlet-tins with a light crust, rather more than half fill them, and bake in a quick oven. Time to bake, twenty minutes. Probable cost, 1d. each. Sufficient for a dozen and a half cheesecakes.
A Victorian tartlet filling built on floury potato rather than curd — sweet, lemony, and closer to a Bakewell than to anything a modern reader means by cheesecake. The whole thing hinges on the potato being properly dry and mealy.
- No cheese involved"Cheesecake" here means a small sweet tartlet in the old English sense; by the nineteenth century the name covered lemon, almond and potato versions containing no cheese at all. Do not add curd, cream cheese or ricotta; the potato is the body of the filling.
- The potato is the hingeIt must be a mealy, high-starch variety — a russet or King Edward — boiled or, better, baked until it breaks apart floury, then riced or sieved while hot. A waxy potato or one holding water gives a gluey, heavy filling that will not lighten with the eggs.
- Three ounces is smallAbout 85 g of cooked potato, roughly one small potato. Weigh it after cooking, not before.
- Pounding the rindGrating the zest of two lemons and working it with the sugar is the period way of extracting the oils; a food processor pulse of zest and sugar, or simply rubbing them together with your fingers for a minute, does the same. The recipe gives no lemon juice — the flavour is all from the rind.
- Clarified butterTwo ounces (55 g) of butter with the milk solids and water removed. Ghee works directly. Ordinary melted butter can be substituted, but the extra water slightly slackens the mixture.
- EggsTwo yolks and one white — the odd single white is deliberate, giving richness with just enough lift. Save the spare white. Add the eggs only once the potato and butter mixture is smooth and no more than warm, or the yolks will set in threads.
- OvenA "quick oven" is usually taken as somewhere around 400-450F (200-230C). For small tartlets with a rich crust, start at about 425F and expect them set and lightly coloured in about 20 minutes; drop to 400F if the pastry edges are darkening early.
- Tins and yieldEighteen small tartlets from a shallow patty or mini-muffin tin, filled a little over halfway so the mixture has room to rise. "A light crust" means short pastry or trimmings of puff, rolled thin and not blind-baked.
- Cost note"1d. each" is one pre-decimal penny per cheesecake — a price reference, not an instruction.
Before "cheesecake" settled into its modern meaning, the word covered almost any small filled tartlet, and English cookery books of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries print lemon cheesecakes, almond cheesecakes and potato cheesecakes side by side, many of them containing no cheese at all. The potato version belongs to a broad family of frugal Victorian fillings that used a starchy base potato, breadcrumb, ground rice, boiled biscuit to stretch butter, sugar and eggs into something rich-tasting; the same logic produced potato pastry and potato cakes in the era's economical baking. The hedged note of a "probable cost, 1d. each" is characteristic of such books, which were written for households running on a budget.