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Ground Rice Cheesecakes
Mix a table-spoonful of ground rice smoothly with two table-spoonfuls of milk, and pour in a quarter of a pint of boiling milk. Stir the mixture over the fire for three or four minutes, till it thickens, adding first, one ounce of butter and four large lumps of sugar, which have been well rubbed on the rind of a fresh lemon. When cold, stir in the yolks of three eggs, well beaten, and a dessert-spoonful of lemon-juice. Line some patty-pans with a good crust, or puff paste, three-parts fill them with the mixture, and bake in a quick oven. The cheesecakes may be dusted over with powdered cinnamon, or grated lemon-rind, before being baked. Time to bake, about twenty minutes. Probable cost, 6d. for this quantity. Sufficient for eight or ten cheesecakes.
A rice-thickened lemon custard baked in pastry cases — no cheese involved, despite the name. The technique is straightforward, but several of the measures need translating.
- Cool the base before the yolksThis is the hinge. The rice mixture must be properly cold, not merely warm, before the beaten yolks go in, or they will set into threads. If you are short of time, spread the thickened rice on a plate to cool quickly.
- Ground riceNot the same as ground rice pudding mix. Use rice flour, or the slightly coarser "ground rice" sold in British baking aisles; either thickens the milk in a few minutes over gentle heat.
- A quarter of a pintAn imperial quarter-pint is 5 fl oz, about 150 ml or a scant 2/3 cup. With the 2 tablespoons used to slake the rice, the whole custard uses only around 175 ml of milk.
- Lumps of sugar on the lemonVictorian lump sugar was broken or cut from a loaf and varied a good deal in size, so four large lumps might be anywhere from about one to two tablespoons of sugar. Rubbing them over the zest until they turn yellow and fragrant extracts the lemon oil — the same principle as an oleo-saccharum. Granulated sugar creamed with a teaspoon of finely grated zest gives a comparable result.
- A quick ovenNo temperature is given in the book; a quick oven is usually taken as somewhere around 400-450F (200-230C). That is right for puff paste but hot for a yolk custard, so watch the last five minutes; the filling should be just set with a slight wobble at the centre.
- Patty-pansShallow tartlet tins or a standard 12-hole bun tin, not deep muffin cups. Line them thinly, fill only three-quarters full as directed, and expect the custard to puff and then settle.
- YieldEight to ten small cheesecakes, best eaten the day they are made. The "probable cost, 6d." is a period price and of no practical use beyond showing how cheaply the dish was reckoned.
English cheesecakes of this kind were often made with no cheese at all: by the eighteenth century the word covered almost any rich sweet filling baked in a pastry case, and lemon, almond and rice versions appear alongside the older curd ones. The rice here does the job that ground almonds or breadcrumbs do elsewhere — bulking and stabilising a small quantity of egg and butter so the filling holds its shape and stretches to eight or ten tarts. Ground rice was a cheap, shelf-stable store-cupboard staple in Victorian households, much used for puddings and for lightening cakes, and Cassell's gives its costings in pence precisely because the book was aimed at cooks working to a household budget rather than a professional kitchen. Rubbing sugar lumps on the lemon rind is a much older trick than the recipe itself, and survives in cocktail-making today.