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Cheese Cakes
1 cup sweet milk Juice and grated rind one lemon 1 cup sour milk 1/4 cup almonds, blanched and chopped 1 cup sugar Yolks 4 eggs 1/4 teaspoon salt Scald sweet and sour milk, strain through cheese cloth. To curd add sugar, yolks of eggs slightly beaten, lemon, and salt. Line patty pans with paste, fill with mixture, and sprinkle with chopped almonds. Bake until mixture is firm to the touch.
This is a curd cheesecake in the old English sense: the filling is fresh curd made in the pan from scalded milk, baked in small pastry shells rather than one large tin. The original gives no oven temperature and no quantity of pastry, so both need supplying.
- The hinge: getting a curdHeat the sweet and sour milk together until the mixture just separates into curds and clear whey, then stop; boiling hard shrinks the curd into rubbery grains. If modern cultured buttermilk does not break the milk on its own, the lemon juice added to the curd can be put in at the scalding stage instead.
- Sweet milk and sour milkSweet milk is ordinary fresh whole milk. Sour milk in this period meant raw milk naturally clabbered at room temperature; cultured buttermilk is the usual substitute, since pasteurised milk left out spoils rather than souring cleanly.
- StrainingLine a sieve with damp cheesecloth and let the curd drain 10 to 15 minutes. Drain it dry and the filling is crumbly; leave it wet and the tarts will not set. Two cups of milk yields only a small amount of curd -- expect a few tablespoons to half a cup, depending on how completely the milk breaks -- which is why the eggs and sugar carry most of the volume.
- Patty pans and pastePatty pans are small tartlet tins or a standard 12-cup muffin tin. "Paste" is plain shortcrust; a single-crust quantity, roughly 1 1/4 cups flour, lines a dozen shells.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none; a moderate oven, around 350-375F, suits this filling. Hotter and the egg yolks curdle at the edges before the centre sets; cooler and the pastry goes pale and soft.
- TimingSmall shells of this size take roughly 20 to 25 minutes. The original asks for the mixture to be 'firm to the touch'; take that as the centre no longer moving as a whole, bearing in mind the custard goes on setting out of the oven.
- AlmondsBlanched almonds are skinned by a minute in boiling water. Sprinkled on raw filling they toast as the tarts bake, so watch them in the last five minutes.
- YieldAbout 12 small cheesecakes. Best eaten the day they are made, at room temperature.
Cheesecakes of this kind contain no cheese as a shopper would recognise it: the cook made the curd herself, breaking milk with acid and draining it, exactly as the first stage of cheesemaking. Small curd tarts flavoured with lemon and almonds have a long run in English cookery, the Richmond maids of honour being the best-known survivor, and American manuscript and printed books carried the pattern through the nineteenth century. The recipe also shows how thoroughly sour milk was treated as an asset rather than a loss. In a household without reliable refrigeration, milk turned constantly, and cookbooks of the period are full of ways to spend it on biscuits, griddle cakes and curds. The instruction to bake in patty pans rather than one dish reflects a dessert course built of small individual pastries, a habit that shaped much of the pastry chapter in books of this era.