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Ratafia Cheese-Cakes
Boil a pint of milk till lukewarm. Sweeten and flavour it with a dessert-spoonful of sugar and two table-spoonfuls of brandy, then stir into it a table-spoonful of rennet. Let it stand in a cool place till it is turned to a curd. Beat it well, draw off the whey, and stir into it three-quarters of an ounce of powdered ratafia biscuits, one ounce of dissolved butter, and two well-beaten eggs. Line some patty-pans with good puff-paste, pour a spoonful of the mixture into each, and bake the cheesecakes in a well-cheated oven. Time to bake, about a quarter of an hour. Probable cost, 1 1/2d. each.
A small curd tart in the old English sense: fresh rennet curd, enriched and baked in pastry cases, not a chilled cream cheese dessert. Two details in the original need attention before you start — the milk temperature and the rennet.
- Rennet and milk temperature"Boil a pint of milk till lukewarm" means scald it and let it fall back to blood heat, in the region of 90-100F. Much hotter and the curd sets fast and tough (rennet itself is only destroyed well above this, nearer 130-140F); below about 85F it sets slowly and weakly.
- The rennet quantity is not transferableA tablespoon of Victorian rennet essence bears no relation to modern standardised liquid rennet, which is far more concentrated — usually a few drops per pint. Follow the strength printed on the bottle rather than the spoonful given here.
- Milk that will not setUHT and ultra-pasteurised milk will not coagulate properly with rennet, and homogenised milk gives a soft, fragile curd. Ordinary fresh whole milk works; a little well-diluted calcium chloride solution, at the strength given on the bottle, helps if the set is slack.
- Add the brandy after the setSpirit stirred into the milk before renneting may slow the set a little. If your curd comes out slack, sweeten and rennet the plain milk and beat the brandy into the drained curd instead.
- Ratafia biscuitsSmall, hard almond macaroons, traditionally flavoured with bitter almond. Modern amaretti are the closest thing; crush them fine. Three-quarters of an ounce is about 20g, a light flavouring rather than a bulk ingredient — the filling stays soft and custardy.
- VesselsAn imperial pint is 20 fl oz. "Patty-pans" are shallow tart tins; a shallow 12-hole bun or tartlet tin lined with puff pastry rounds is the nearest equivalent.
- Oven"Well-cheated" is a misprint for well-heated. The recipe gives no temperature; in modern terms a hot oven, in the region of 400-425F, is what puff pastry needs to lift in the quarter of an hour given. The filling is set when it is just firm at the centre and lightly coloured.
- YieldThe pint of milk should give enough curd for roughly a dozen small cheesecakes, though the recipe does not say; it prices them at 1 1/2d. — three halfpence — each. They are best eaten the day they are baked.
Cheesecakes of this kind are the older English sort: a fresh curd, drained of whey, bound with butter and egg and baked in pastry, a line that survives today in the Yorkshire curd tart. The ratafia in the title is the biscuit, not the liqueur, though the two share a name — ratafia was a cordial flavoured with almonds or fruit kernels, and the little almond macaroons sold as ratafias are generally said to have taken their name from the same bitter-almond note. The costing to the halfpenny is characteristic of the book, which was written for households keeping accounts as closely as they kept recipes.