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Cheesecakes, Winter
A curd for cheesecakes may be made by mixing as much grated biscuit with five eggs and a pint of cream as will make a light batter; sugar and flavouring should be added. To make the paste, mix a pound of flour, a table-spoonful of baking powder, and salt, with the whisked whites of two eggs. Divide half a pound of butter into three parts, roll out the pastry three times, and each time spread one part of the butter upon it, flour lightly, and proceed as in the foregoing recipe.
Two components with one Victorian assumption running through both: that the cook already knows how to handle rich pastry and small tartlet tins. The filling is a baked custard thickened with crumbs rather than curd, which is what makes it a winter recipe.
- "Grated biscuit"This means dry, plain English biscuit — rusk, sponge finger or a hard sweet biscuit — grated to fine crumbs, not an American soda biscuit. Plain sponge or Nice-type biscuits give the closest texture; digestives are too heavy and too sweet.
- How much crumb"As will make a light batter" is the only guidance given. With five eggs and a pint of cream, expect roughly 4 to 6 oz of crumbs — the mixture should coat a spoon thickly but still pour. Add them gradually and stop before it stiffens, since the crumbs swell as they stand.
- The pintAn imperial pint, 20 fl oz, not the American 16. Use 2 1⁄2 cups of cream if working by US measure.
- Sugar and flavouringUnquantified, as usual. About 4 oz of caster sugar suits this volume; lemon zest, nutmeg, brandy and orange-flower water were all common flavourings in cheesecake receipts of the period.
- The pastry is short of liquidTwo egg whites is barely 2 fl oz against a pound of flour. The recipe defers to "the foregoing recipe", which may have supplied more liquid; as it stands here, rubbing in a little of the butter first and adding cold water by the spoonful until the dough just coheres is the practical remedy, since taken literally the mixture will not come together.
- Three turns, coldThis is rough puff by another name: butter spread in three instalments over three rollings. Keep butter and dough cold and rest the paste in the refrigerator between turns, or the layers merge and the pastry bakes heavy.
- Oven and tinsEnglish cheesecakes of this period were generally small tartlets baked in patty pans rather than one large cake. The recipe gives no oven direction at all: a hot oven to set the pastry, then a moderate one until the custard is just set with a slight wobble at the centre, is a modern reconstruction rather than anything the book states.
- YieldA pound of flour and a pint of cream will fill roughly two to three dozen small tartlets. Halving works well enough, though five eggs will not divide evenly.
In English cookery "cheesecake" long meant a small open tart filled with curd — milk soured or set with rennet, drained, and enriched with butter, eggs, sugar and spice — and it was a dairy-season dish, best when cows were in full milk on spring and summer grass. With milk scarcer and poorer in the cold months, cooks fell back on cream thickened with grated biscuit or breadcrumbs to imitate the body of drained curd, a substitution that appears in English receipt books well before Cassell's compiled this dictionary in the later nineteenth century.