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Cheesecakes, Savoury
Mix thoroughly a pint of well-drained curd, three ounces of butter, the yolks of six and the whites of two eggs well beaten. Rub them through a coarse sieve, and add a quarter of a pound of grated Parmesan, and a little salt and pepper. If preferred, the curd may be omitted, and a little cream substituted. Of course, in that case, there would be no necessity to rub the mixture through a sieve. Line some tartlet-tins with good crust, three-parts fill them with the mixture, and bake in a good oven for about twenty minutes. Probable cost, 1 1/2d. each. Sufficient for four dozen cheesecakes.
A Victorian savoury curd tart, closer to a small quiche than to anything a modern reader means by cheesecake. The mixture is stiff, so the hinge is the sieving: unsieved curd stays granular and the baked filling turns coarse and weepy.
- A pint of curdCurd here is fresh drained cheese curd; an imperial pint is 20 fl oz, so nearer a pound and a quarter by weight, or about two and a half cups. Dry-curd or pressed cottage cheese, well drained in a sieve or cloth, is the closest supermarket equivalent; ricotta works if you drain it overnight.
- Sieve, then seasonPush the curd, butter and eggs through a coarse sieve before the Parmesan goes in, not after. Grated Parmesan forced through a sieve just clogs it, and the point of the operation is to break down the curd granules.
- "A good oven"The recipe gives no temperature. A moderately hot oven, somewhere around 375-400F/190-200C, will set the filling and colour the pastry in the twenty minutes given, which is presumably why no blind baking is mentioned.
- The egg ratioSix yolks to only two whites makes for a rich, yolk-heavy filling rather than an airy one. Whatever the reasoning, do not round it up to whole eggs.
- The cream variationIf you leave out the curd, the recipe gives no quantity for the cream; "a little" is all it says. Four to five tablespoons of double cream is a reasonable reading, enough to bring the eggs, butter and cheese to a pourable custard.
- "Good crust"The recipe does not say what this means; a plain short paste rather than the sweetened lining paste used for jam tartlets suits a savoury filling. Roll it thin, as tartlet tins are shallow.
- YieldFour dozen small tartlets is a party quantity. Quartered, the recipe gives a dozen from a quarter-pint (5 fl oz) of curd, three-quarters of an ounce of butter, one and a half yolks (use one yolk plus a splash of white) and an ounce of Parmesan.
- Probable cost1 1/2d. each is pre-decimal British currency, three halfpence.
For most of its history "cheesecake" in English meant a small pastry case filled with fresh curd, eggs and butter, baked in tartlet tins, and usually sweet. Sweetened versions with currants, lemon peel and sugar dominate the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century recipe books, but savoury ones seasoned with Parmesan and pepper sat alongside them, and the entry in Cassell's is headed simply "Cheesecakes, Savoury". The book dates from the late Victorian decades, when a dinner in the English service ended with a savoury course, and small hot cheese pastries were a standard answer to it, along with cheese straws, ramekins and anchovy toasts. Parmesan was already the reliable grating cheese of the English kitchen, imported hard and keeping well, which is said to be why it turns up in these recipes so readily.