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Curd Cheesecakes
Turn one quart of milk with a little rennet; drain off the whey, and mix with the curd a piece of butter the size of a large egg, beaten to a cream; press it through a coarse sieve, and mix with it a heaped table-spoonful of pounded loaf sugar, the peel of a lemon finely shredded, two table-spoonfuls of currants, two well-beaten eggs, and a dozen sweet and two bitter almonds, blanched and pounded. Line some patty-pans with a good crust, three parts fill them with the mixture, and bake in a good oven. Time to bake, about twenty minutes. Probable cost, 1d. each. Sufficient, a dozen for a dish.
This is a small curd tart of a type common in Victorian pastry work, but it is built around an ingredient that is no longer sold as food and cannot be safely used at home.
- The bitter almondsBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the nuts are crushed and moistened — exactly what pounding them into a wet curd mixture does. Their sale for eating is prohibited in the United States and restricted elsewhere, and the amount of cyanide in a given batch of nuts is variable, so no quantity can be called reliably safe. Twenty minutes in a hot oven does not remove it in any dependable way.
- Why two, and why it mattersThe two bitter almonds are there for flavour, not bulk: they supply the marzipan note that a dozen sweet almonds alone will not give. That is precisely why the recipe cannot simply be scaled down or the nuts left in — the flavouring agent is the hazard. A current recipe should be used instead.
- Rennet and the curdTurning a quart of milk with rennet gives a soft junket-style curd, not the pressed dry curd sold today as farmer's cheese or quark. Domestic rennet of this period was often a piece of salted calf stomach steeped in water, though prepared rennet was also sold; modern liquid or tablet rennet is far more concentrated and dosed by drops.
- Loaf sugarPounded loaf sugar means refined white sugar broken from a hard cone and crushed — the ordinary granulated or caster sugar of a modern cupboard. The pounding was a step in obtaining the sugar, not a technique.
- Patty-pans and "a good oven"Patty-pans are small individual tart tins, roughly the size of a modern deep bun tin cup; a dozen is one dish. "A good oven" means a briskly heated one; Cassell's gives no temperatures, so any Fahrenheit figure is a modern guess rather than the book's own.
- CurrantsThese are dried Zante currants, the small black raisins, not fresh redcurrants or blackcurrants. The distinction trips up readers of British books constantly.
Curd cheesecakes of this kind are often linked with the Yorkshire curd tart, and they belong to a much older English tradition in which "cheesecake" meant a pastry case filled with fresh, unripened curd rather than anything resembling the baked cream-cheese dessert now understood by the name. The pattern is medieval in outline — curd, eggs, butter, dried fruit, sugar and a perfumed note — and it survived in domestic cookery long after the fashionable table had moved on; Cassell's files it among the plain, cheap items and prices it at a penny apiece. The bitter almond was the standard Victorian source of that perfume, used in tiny quantity in puddings, ratafias and macaroons well before its toxicity was regulated; commercial almond essence, distilled and stripped of cyanide, gradually displaced it in the household kitchen over the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.