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Canadian Cheese Cakes
One pound of curd from scalded sour milk, drain and press dry; pound sugar, ½ pound butter. Beat 8 eggs well. Add juice and grated rind of 2 lemons. Mix thoroughly. Bake in tart shells or in pies with under crust only.
A lemon curd-cheese filling of the old English cheesecake type, baked in pastry. Two things need attention before you start: the curd, and the sugar quantity.
- Do not clabber pasteurized milkThe original assumes raw milk left to sour into clabber, which is then scalded and drained. Pasteurized homogenized milk left out does not sour cleanly; it spoils. Buy dry-curd cottage cheese or press whole-milk ricotta, or make curd deliberately by heating milk and adding lemon juice or rennet.
- How dry is "press dry"The curd should be crumbly and no longer weeping whey, roughly the texture of dry cottage cheese. Wet curd will make the filling loose and it will weep in the shell. Drain in cheesecloth under a weight for an hour if in doubt.
- The sugar is ambiguous"pound sugar" may mean one pound, set beside the half pound of butter, or it may be the older shorthand for pounded (finely crushed) sugar; the line as printed does not settle it. A pound of sugar to a pound of curd is very sweet by modern taste; 1 to 1 1/2 cups is closer to modern preference.
- Weights in cupsA pound of curd is about 2 cups; half a pound of butter is 1 cup, two sticks. Cream the butter and sugar first, then work in the curd, then the eggs, or the mixture will stay lumpy.
- OvenThe book gives none. Bake at 350F until the filling is set at the edge and barely trembles at the centre, about 25 to 30 minutes for small tarts and 40 to 45 for a single pie. An egg-rich filling that browns hard has gone too far and will crack.
- Under crust onlyThere is no top. Blind-bake the shell for 10 minutes before filling if you want the base crisp, since this filling gives up moisture as it sets.
- YieldThe full quantity is generous: about two 9-inch open pies, or roughly two dozen small tarts. Halve it comfortably. Keep leftovers refrigerated, as with any custard.
Cheesecakes of this kind are much older than the cream-cheese version most people now picture: a drained fresh curd beaten with butter, sugar, eggs and lemon, baked in pastry, is standard in English cookery books from the seventeenth century onward. The name in this book is likely more a matter of household attribution than of national origin, though the reliance on sour milk curd fits a farm kitchen where milk came in daily and had to be used before it turned. Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company to sell its flour, and its recipes were solicited from Canadian housewives, which accounts for the compressed, note-to-self style here.