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ORANGE CHEESECAKES (another way)
Rub the rind of a Seville orange with two or three lumps of sugar until all the yellow part is taken off. Crush the sugar to powder, and put it into a saucepan with three table-spoonfuls of new milk and a quarter of a pound of fresh butter. Stir all over the fire until the butter is dissolved, then pour the liquid over four ounces of sponge biscuits. Beat them well with a fork, and add three ounces of sugar, half a salt-spoonful of nutmeg grated, a table-spoonful of brandy, and three eggs well-beaten. Mix thoroughly. Line some patty-pans with good puff-paste, half fill them with the mixture, and bake in a quick oven for a quarter of an hour. Probable cost, 1s. 4d. Sufficient for half a dozen cheesecakes.
A Victorian "cheesecake" of the older English sort: a rich butter-and-egg tartlet filling in puff pastry, with no cheese in it at all. The whole point is the sugar-rubbing step, so do not skip it.
- Rub the sugar, don't zestRubbing lump sugar over the orange until the yellow is gone draws the peel oil straight into the sugar, which carries far more aroma than grated zest. Sugar cubes work; rub firmly and turn the fruit as the sugar colours.
- Seville orangesThese are the bitter marmalade oranges, in season roughly January to February and sold mainly by greengrocers and online. If you cannot get one, the peel of a large ordinary orange plus a little lemon peel gives a closer result than orange alone.
- Sponge biscuitsFour ounces (115 g) of plain sponge fingers — savoiardi or ladyfingers. They arguably take the place of the fresh curd of older cheesecakes, and they thicken the filling as they soak.
- Weights and small measuresA quarter pound of butter is 115 g, three ounces of sugar is 85 g, and three tablespoonfuls of milk is a scant 45 ml. "New milk" simply means fresh whole milk. A salt-spoonful is about a quarter teaspoon, so half of one is a generous pinch of nutmeg.
- Patty-pansShallow tartlet tins, close to a modern 12-hole bun or shallow muffin tray rather than a deep muffin tin. Line with puff pastry and half fill only: the egg mixture puffs and will run over a full case.
- A quick ovenRoughly 400–425F (200–220C). Fifteen minutes at that heat sets the filling and lifts the pastry; the tops should be domed and lightly browned and will sink a little as they cool.
- YieldThe book says half a dozen, which suggests larger tins than most people now own. From a standard shallow bun tray you will probably get closer to 10 or 12, so check them at 12 minutes.
- ServingBest barely warm or at room temperature the day they are made. The pastry softens overnight.
In English cookery books "cheesecake" long described any small rich tart baked in pastry, and by the eighteenth century many of the recipes under that name had lost their cheese entirely — lemon cheesecakes, almond cheesecakes and orange cheesecakes were thickened instead with butter, eggs, ground almonds or, as here, crumbled sponge biscuit. The older ancestor was a curd tart made from the solids left after milk was turned, and the name simply outlived the ingredient. That this version specifies a Seville orange places it in the winter months, when the bitter Spanish fruit arrived in Britain for the marmalade-making season and cooks had a brief window to use its intensely aromatic peel; sweet oranges were available far longer but were generally held to have less fragrant rind. Cassell's, compiled for middle-class households with a servant or two, prices the dish at 1s. 4d., part of the dictionary's habit of costing every recipe so that a mistress could check the kitchen accounts.