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LEMON CHEESECAKES (that will keep)
Rub a pound of loaf sugar upon the rind of two large fresh lemons until all the yellow part is taken off. Crush it to powder, and mix with it the strained juice of the lemons, the yolks of six and the whites of four well-beaten eggs, three sponge biscuits, grated, and four ounces of sweet butter. Put all together in a saucepan over the fire, and stir one way until the mixture is as thick as honey. It may be used at once, or, if preferred, may be put into a jar and covered closely. If kept in a cool, dry place, the mixture will remain good for two or three years. Time, half an hour to prepare. Probable cost, 1s. 8d. Sufficient for three dozen cheesecakes.
This is lemon curd — what Victorian and Edwardian books call lemon cheese — intended as a filling for three dozen small pastry tartlets, the "cheesecakes" of the title. The cooking itself is an ordinary stirred custard, but the keeping instruction attached to it is the reason this page carries a caution.
- Why the storage claim failsEgg yolk, butter and sugar cooked only to honey thickness is a moist, low-acid-in-parts, protein-rich food. Sealing it in a jar and leaving it in a larder for two or three years is home preserving with no processing temperature, no sterilised seal and no measured pH; it invites mould, rancidity in the butter and, in an airtight jar at room temperature, anaerobic bacterial growth. Commercial shelf-stable curd is formulated and heat-processed to specifications this recipe has no equivalent of.
- The acid is not doing what the author thinksThe acid may not be doing as much as it seems -- The juice of two lemons against a pound of sugar, six yolks, four whites and four ounces of butter is unlikely to be enough acid, evenly enough distributed, to make the mixture keep. Sharpness on the tongue is not a reliable guide to whether something is safe to store.
- If you want lemon curdUse a current recipe with modern refrigerated storage guidance. The historical text is worth reading for its method and its economics, not for its larder advice.
- Loaf sugarRefined sugar sold in a hard cone, broken and crushed as needed. The rubbing of the lump against the zest was the standard way to extract lemon oil before microplanes existed; granulated sugar is the modern equivalent of the crushed powder called for here.
- Sponge biscuitsDry, finger-shaped sponge cakes — savoiardi or ladyfingers. Grated in, they would act as a starch thickener and some insurance against the eggs curdling; later curd recipes more often use cornflour or no thickener at all.
- Sweet butterUnsalted butter. In an era when much butter was salted for keeping, "sweet" meant fresh and unsalted, and it generally cost more.
- "Stir one way"Kitchen folklore rather than physics — reversing the spoon was believed to make mixtures curdle or turn. What the instruction really encodes is constant, gentle agitation over low heat.
- The costing1s. 8d. is one shilling and eightpence in pre-decimal currency. Cassell's gave a probable cost for nearly every entry, a habit aimed squarely at the household with a fixed weekly allowance.
"Cheesecake" in British cookery long predates the baked cream-cheese dessert an American reader will picture: it meant a small pastry case with a rich filling, and by the eighteenth century many so-called cheesecakes contained no cheese at all — only curd-like mixtures of eggs, butter, sugar and flavouring. Lemon versions of this filling were sold and stored as "lemon cheese" or "lemon curd", the name surviving in Britain to this day, and the same mixture served as tart filling, cake filling and preserve depending on the household. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery was an enormous alphabetical compendium of the late Victorian period, in which a keeping claim of two or three years sits in print alongside a careful costing to the penny.