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Cheese Cake
1 cream cheese 1/2 cup butter 1 cup Dromedary Cocoanut, chopped 1 cup flour 1 pinch salt 2 tablespoons cream or milk Dromedary Dates, chopped Mix cheese and butter together, add cocoanut, flour, salt and cream. Mix and chill. Roll out, cut in rounds, put a few chopped dates on half the pieces of pastry, cover with remainder, lay on greased tins, brush over with beaten egg or milk, sprinkle with sugar, and bake in hot oven from 12 to 15 minutes. Serve hot or cold. COCOANUT
A cream-cheese short pastry filled with dates — closer to a turnover or rugelach than to anything a modern reader means by cheesecake. The dough is the whole point, and it depends on being properly cold.
- "1 cream cheese"This means one retail package. Small foil-wrapped bars of about 3 ounces were commonly sold in the period these booklets were printed, and 3 oz balances the half cup of butter reasonably well; an 8-ounce block would give a much softer, wetter dough. The original is genuinely ambiguous, so start at 3 oz and add flour only if the dough will not hold.
- Hot ovenRead this as roughly 400-425°F. At that heat the 12 to 15 minutes given is right for small rounds — the pastry should be set and lightly coloured, not deeply browned.
- Chill is not optional"Mix and chill" is the hinge of the recipe. Cream cheese pastry is unrollable at room temperature and the butter must be firm going into the oven or the rounds spread and leak. An hour in the refrigerator, and roll it cold.
- Dromedary CocoanutThe canned moist shredded coconut of the era. Modern moist shredded or flaked coconut is the nearest substitute; chop it as directed or it will tear the thin dough. Unsweetened desiccated coconut will make a drier, less cohesive pastry.
- The datesDromedary dates were pitted and fairly dry. If using soft Medjools, use a little less and chop finer — too much moisture inside will steam the seam open.
- SealingThe recipe does not say to crimp, but press the edges of the two rounds together firmly with a fork before the egg wash, or the filling escapes and burns on the tin.
- YieldWith a 2-inch cutter the dough makes roughly 18 to 24 filled rounds, depending on how thin you roll. They keep two or three days in a tin and are better warmed briefly before serving.
This comes from one of the recipe booklets issued by the Hills Brothers Company of New York to sell Dromedary dates and coconut, both of which the firm packaged for the American grocery trade in the early twentieth century — dates shipped from the Persian Gulf, coconut shredded and canned so that home cooks no longer had to crack and grate their own. The title is often said to preserve an older, broader sense of "cheese cake": a small pastry made or filled with cheese, a usage generally traced back through centuries of English cookery and not yet captured entirely by the baked custard sort. What is distinctly modern about it is the dough itself, since cream cheese pastry of this kind belongs to the era when cream cheese was sold in uniform packaged bars — which is also why the recipe can get away with calling for "1 cream cheese" and expect to be understood.