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Treacle Cheesecakes
Line a buttered plate or large tartlet-tin with good short crust, and then fill it with a mixture prepared as follows. Stir a table-spoonful of flour into four table-spoonfuls of good treacle, and when the preparation is quite smooth add as much powdered ginger as will lie on a four-penny-piece. Ornament the cheesecakes by laying twists of pastry across the top, and bake in a well-heated oven for half an hour. Probable cost, 8d. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A treacle tart in miniature, and one of the leanest recipes in the book: three ingredients in the filling and no cheese at all. The main practical problem is quantity, since four tablespoons of treacle will barely glaze a large tin.
- Scale the filling upFour tablespoons of treacle with one of flour is enough for a shallow tartlet tin or a few individual cases, not a full plate pie. For a 9-inch tart keep the ratio and use about 250g (three-quarters of a cup) treacle to 3 tablespoons flour.
- Which treacle"Good treacle" here most likely means black treacle, closer to molasses than to golden syrup, and the result is dark and slightly bitter. Golden syrup, sold in Britain from the mid-1880s onwards, gives the sweeter, paler filling most people now expect from a treacle tart; a mix of the two is a fair compromise.
- As much as will lie on a fourpenny pieceThe fourpenny "groat" was a small silver coin about 16mm across. Ground ginger heaped on that comes to roughly a quarter teaspoon, which is a whisper against black treacle; half a teaspoon is more assertive without taking over.
- Well-heated ovenRead this as 400F (200C). Hot enough to set the pastry before the syrup soaks it, but not so hot that the filling scorches at the edges during the half hour.
- The flour is the whole structureThere is no egg and no breadcrumb here, so the tablespoon of flour is the only thing keeping the treacle from running. Stir it into the treacle until absolutely smooth before it goes near the pastry; lumps of dry flour will sit as pale specks in the baked filling.
- Blind-bake if the case is deepA shallow tartlet holds up fine, but a full-sized case filled with cold syrup will go soggy underneath. Bake the shell 12 minutes at 400F, fill, then finish.
- Pastry twistsRoll the trimmings thin, cut narrow strips, twist each once or twice and lay them over the filling. They brown faster than the filling sets, so a light brush of milk rather than egg keeps them from going too dark.
- CoolingThe filling is liquid and very hot out of the oven and firms as it cools. Let it stand at least 20 minutes before cutting or it will flood the plate.
- YieldThe book gives it as sufficient for five or six persons; the plural "cheesecakes" and the tartlet tin suggest small individual tarts rather than one large one. Scaled to a 9-inch tin it cuts into six to eight slices.
The name is the puzzle: no cheese, no curd, nothing dairy at all. By the nineteenth century "cheesecake" in British usage had drifted from its original meaning to cover almost any small filled open tart, so lemon cheesecakes, almond cheesecakes and treacle cheesecakes all appear in Victorian cookery books with no cheese among them. Treacle itself was the cheap sweetener of the period, a by-product of sugar refining and much cheaper than loaf sugar, which is part of why the dish is costed so low and why treacle puddings, tarts and toffees run all through working-class cooking of the age. Golden syrup, the lighter refinery product now standard in treacle tart, reached British kitchens from the mid-1880s and gradually displaced black treacle in sweet baking, which is why a modern treacle tart tastes little like this one would have.