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Old-Fashioned Cheese Cake
One-half cup sugar, small lump butter, one egg, one-half cup of sour milk, one-fourth teaspoon saleratus, flour enough to make soft dough; roll about one-eighth inch thick and line deep pie plate. Filling-One cup of pot-cheese, three eggs, three tablespoons sugar; flavor with either lemon or vanilla, add a few dried currants
— Mrs. Tremain Loud
and bake until solid.
A two-part receipt: a soft sour-milk biscuit dough for the shell, and a fresh-cheese custard to fill it. The instructions assume a cook who already knows what a set custard looks like, so the gaps worth filling are the oven and the cheese.
- SaleratusSaleratus is baking soda, and a quarter teaspoon is the right amount for half a cup of sour milk. It is there to react with the acid in the milk, which is why the dough must go into the plate and into the oven without standing about.
- Sour milkSour milk in this period was generally raw milk left to clabber. Cultured buttermilk is the nearest honest substitute; half a cup of whole milk with a scant teaspoon of lemon juice or vinegar, left ten minutes, will also serve.
- Pot cheesePot cheese is a fresh, unpressed, unsalted curd — closest today to dry-curd cottage cheese or farmer cheese. Ordinary creamed cottage cheese carries too much liquid; drain it well and press it through a sieve, or the filling will weep.
- "Small lump butter"Read this as 1 to 2 tablespoons. The dough is a short biscuit dough rather than a pastry, so it wants only enough fat to keep it tender.
- Rolling the shellAn eighth of an inch is thin for a soft dough. Chill it briefly, roll it on a well-floured board, and expect to patch rather than lift it in one piece. Any deep pie plate will do; a modern 9-inch deep plate is a reasonable stand-in.
- Oven and timeNo temperature is given. A modern equivalent would be about 350F for 40 to 50 minutes: the custard should be set at the edge and barely trembling at the centre, roughly 175F internally.
- "Bake until solid"Take that as set, not firm throughout. Pushed past the point where the middle stops moving, an egg-and-curd filling curdles and cracks, and the surface turns grainy.
- CurrantsDried currants, not fresh redcurrants. A few tablespoons is plenty; soaking them in warm water or lemon juice for ten minutes keeps them from drawing moisture out of the custard.
- YieldOne deep pie plate, six to eight servings. Cool it completely before cutting -- warm curd custard slumps.
Cheese cakes of this kind -- a fresh curd custard in a plain crust -- long predate the cream-cheese cake most Americans now picture, and they belonged to households that made their own cheese as a matter of course. Pot cheese was simply what happened to milk that had turned: drained, it became cheese, and the whey and sour milk went into breads and cakes, which is why the same receipt uses sour milk in the shell and curd in the filling. The saleratus points loosely to the era after baking soda had become a cheap grocery item, while cooks still leaned on soured dairy for the acid to activate it -- and a compiled cookbook like this one, crediting a receipt by name to the neighbour who contributed it, is exactly where such kitchen habits were recorded.