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Quince Cheesecake
Line a soup plate with crust, then pour some golden syrup over, and lay some quince jam on top to completely cover the syrup, squeeze a little lemon-juice over, a good sprinkling of sugar, and some small pieces of butter; then ornament the top with leaves of pastry or any other fancy design. Bake in a moderate oven for twenty-five minutes, or until the pastry is browned.
An open jam tart of the plainest sort, built in a shallow dish rather than a deep tin. The main thing to get right is the crust, since the filling needs no cooking at all.
- "Cheesecake" means no cheeseBy the nineteenth century the word had drifted to cover any small open tart with a sweet filling in a pastry case. Nothing dairy is called for here beyond the dots of butter.
- The soup plateA Victorian soup plate is a wide, shallow, rimmed dish, so the tart is thin and mostly crust. A 9-inch pie plate or a shallow ceramic tart dish gives the same proportions; a deep tin will leave you with too much pastry for the filling.
- Moderate ovenAround 350F is the usual modern reading of the term. Twenty-five minutes at that heat should brown thin shortcrust in a shallow dish; if the pastry is still pale, give it another five to ten minutes.
- CrustThe recipe does not say which crust; shortcrust or a plain paste both suit it, and puff also works and is likelier to give the leaves and fancy top a good lift. Chill the lined dish before filling to limit shrinkage down the sloping sides.
- Golden syrupStill sold under the same name: a partially inverted cane sugar syrup, less assertive than molasses. Light corn syrup is the nearest substitute but lacks the faint caramel note.
- Quince jamQuince jam or the stiffer quince paste (membrillo) both work. If using paste, warm it slightly or slice it thin so it spreads over the syrup rather than sitting in a block. The lemon juice matters — quince and golden syrup together are very sweet, and the acid is what keeps the tart from cloying.
- SugarGiven the syrup and the jam, the "good sprinkling" is best read as a light one, and it is chiefly there to crisp the surface.
- Yield and servingA 9-inch plate cuts into four to six wedges. Serve just warm, not hot, or the syrup runs; cream or custard alongside would not be out of place.
Quinces were a standard fixture of the English kitchen garden long before they became a specialist purchase, valued because they set to a firm jelly or paste without added pectin and so kept through the winter in a store cupboard. This recipe belongs to the class of thrifty made-up sweets that fill out Victorian household manuals: the fruit work has already been done at preserving time, and the cook is simply assembling jam, syrup and a scrap of leftover pastry into something presentable. Golden syrup was a cheap commercial sweetener in later nineteenth-century Britain; Abram Lyle's Plaistow works began producing it in the early 1880s, though how that dating sits against this book's compilation is uncertain. The "cheesecake" label is a survival: medieval and early modern cheesecakes did contain curds, and the name outlived the ingredient by centuries.