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Rice Cheesecakes
Beat four ounces of butter to cream; add four ounces of powdered and sifted loaf sugar, two ounces of ground rice, a pinch of grated orange or lemon-rind, and two well-beaten eggs. Or, simmer a pint of cream with a little mace, cinnamon, lemon, or orange till it is pleasantly flavoured. Add gradually, off the fire, two ounces of ground rice, and stir the preparation again, over the fire, till it is quite smooth. Pour it into a bowl, and when it is a little cool mix with it six well-beaten eggs. Stir it over the fire till it is thick like curd, sweeten, and add to it two ounces of blanched and pounded almonds. Or, beat four ounces of butter to cream; add four ounces of pounded and sifted sugar, four ounces of ground rice, the well-beaten yolks of six eggs and the whites of three, and a glassful of brandy. A little lemon, orange, or almond flavouring may be added. Or, wash two ounces of rice, and boil it in plenty of water till tender. Drain it and beat it well, then put it into a saucepan with a quarter of a pound of butter, a quarter of a pint of cream, three table-spoonfuls of powdered sugar, three eggs well beaten, two table-spoonfuls of brandy, and a little lemon or almond flavouring. Stir the mixture over the fire till it is thick, then let it cool. To make the cheesecakes prepare any of the above mixtures, line some patty-pans with good pastry, three-parts fill them with the preparation, and bake in a well-heated oven. Time to bake, about twenty minutes. Probable cost, 1 1/2d. to 2d. each.
Four separate fillings are given here, any one of which is spooned into pastry-lined tins; only the last two are custards that need cooking before they go in. Read to the end before starting, since the assembly instructions come after all four variants.
- No cheese involvedGeorgian and Victorian "cheesecakes" are small pastry tarts filled with a rich curd or creamed mixture, not the set cheese desserts the name now means. Nothing here curdles into actual cheese; the second variant simply cooks eggs and cream to a curd-like thickness.
- Patty-pansSmall tartlet or bun tins. A 12-hole muffin tin or individual tartlet moulds work; line with shortcrust and fill only three-quarters full, as the egg mixtures rise.
- Ground rice and loaf sugarGround rice is coarse rice flour, sold in Asian and baking aisles; ordinary rice flour is finer but works. Loaf sugar was cut from a hard cone and pounded, so "pounded and sifted sugar" simply means caster or superfine sugar today.
- Oven heatA "well-heated oven" for small pastry is usually taken to mean something in the region of 400F (200C), though the term is imprecise. Twenty minutes suits tartlets of that size; the filling should be set at the edge with a faint wobble at the centre.
- A pint and a glassfulThe pint is Imperial, 20 fl oz, so roughly 2 1/2 US cups of cream. "A glassful of brandy" is genuinely vague in this period, anywhere from a wineglass (commonly reckoned about 2 fl oz, or four tablespoons) down to a smaller sherry glass; two to four tablespoons is a reasonable reading.
- The custard variantsIn the second and fourth mixtures the eggs must thicken over gentle heat without boiling, or the filling scrambles and weeps in the pastry. Let the flavoured cream cool before the eggs go in, as the recipe says, and stir constantly over low heat until it coats the spoon heavily.
- Almond flavouringThe pounded blanched almonds are just sweet almonds ground to a paste. Where the text says "almond flavouring", use modern almond extract; nineteenth-century almond essence was often made from bitter almonds and was far stronger and less predictable.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; each mixture would probably fill something like a dozen small tartlets. The costing of 1 1/2d. to 2d. apiece shows they were priced by the individual cake, for tea or a supper table.
The plural title is the giveaway that this is an old form: "cheesecakes" in English cookery books from the seventeenth century onward were commonly individual filled tarts, and by the time Cassell's compiled its dictionary in the 1870s and 80s the family had spread far beyond curd. Lemon cheesecakes, almond cheesecakes and rice cheesecakes all kept the name while dispensing with the cheese, held together instead by eggs, butter and a starch. Ground rice was a common thickener in the Victorian pastry kitchen, and cheaper than almonds. Offering four interchangeable mixtures under one heading is characteristic of the dictionary format.