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Lemon Sandwiches
Take one pound of rich puff paste and roll it out very thinly. Divide it in halves, and spread over one half a layer of lemon cheesecake mixture. Put the other half upon it, press it closely, mark it lightly into diamonds, and bake in a moderate oven for twenty minutes. Probable cost, 2s. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A two-sentence recipe that assumes you already know what "lemon cheesecake mixture" is. Everything hinges on that filling and on keeping it thick enough not to flood the pastry.
- Lemon cheesecake mixtureNo cheese is involved. In Victorian and Edwardian usage this is lemon cheese, now sold as lemon curd: butter, sugar, eggs and lemon juice and zest thickened over gentle heat. Bought curd works, and a stiff one behaves better than a loose one.
- A moderate ovenUsually taken as roughly 350-375F/175-190C. The book gives no figure, and puff paste is more often baked hotter than this.
- One pound of puff pasteAbout 450g, which in practice is two 320g sheets of shop-bought all-butter puff trimmed to match. Roll to around 3mm; "very thinly" here still means thin enough to puff, not strudel-thin.
- Sealing the edgesPressing the two sheets together is the whole defence against leakage. Leave a clear 1cm border free of curd, press it down firmly, and dock the top sheet lightly so steam escapes upward rather than sideways.
- Marking into diamondsScore the top layer only, before baking, cutting no more than halfway through. Cut all the way through along those lines once the slab has cooled, or the hot filling will run.
- Filling quantityThe recipe gives none. Roughly 250-300g of curd spread in a thin, even layer over a sheet that size is plenty; more will bubble out and caramelise on the tray.
- Yield"Four or five persons" means four or five as a tea-table item, not a slab each. Expect twelve to sixteen diamonds from the finished sheet. Best eaten the day they are made, since the curd softens the pastry overnight.
- Probable cost2s is two shillings, a period price with no useful modern equivalent. Cassell gave these figures so a housekeeper could plan against a weekly budget.
Lemon cheese, or lemon curd, was a standing preserve in British kitchens by the nineteenth century, made when eggs and butter were plentiful and used for tarts, cheesecakes and sandwiches like this one. The name "cheesecake" is often said to have attached itself to the curd because the mixture set into small pastry cases in the way a curd cheese tart did, though the direction of the borrowing is arguable, since cheesecake originally did contain curd cheese; in any case the word survived long after any dairy curd left the recipe. "Sandwiches" in a book of this kind need not mean bread; the term also covers any two layers with a filling between, and the sweet puff-paste version was standard tea-table work. Cassell's, first issued in the 1870s and reissued in the expanded New Dictionary, could keep a recipe this short by assuming the reader had lemon cheese already made and puff paste already in hand.