Cheese Cakes
Yolks of twelve eggs, one pound sugar, one-half pound butter, one cupful flour, one pint milk, juice of two lemons. The milk, flour, and butter, creamed, and lemons put in together, after the eggs are well beaten. Stir all well together till it curds.
Bake in paste.--Mrs. A. C.
A Victorian "cheese cake" is a small curd tart, not the dense cream-cheese slab the name now suggests. Nothing here contains cheese: the curd is made by acid from the lemons setting the milk and yolks.
- The hinge: curdling on gentle heatThe hinge: "Stir all well together till it curds." The text does not specify heat, and the lemon juice alone will curdle milk; if you do warm the mixture, keep the heat low and stir constantly, since boiling will scramble the yolks into grains and make the filling weep in the oven.
- Read the order of work carefullyThe wording is compressed: the milk, flour and butter are creamed and the lemons put in together, after the eggs are well beaten. A workable modern reconstruction is to cream the butter and sugar, beat in the yolks, then work in the flour before adding the milk and lemon juice; this is an interpretation, not what the text specifies.
- "Bake in paste"Line tartlet or muffin tins, or one 9-inch tin, with shortcrust and pour in the filling. Cheesecakes of this kind were commonly baked as small tarts rather than one large one; this quantity of filling should fill roughly two dozen tartlet shells.
- OvenNo temperature is given. Bake at 350F until the pastry is set and coloured and the filling only just trembles in the centre, about 20 to 25 minutes for tartlets. The filling will firm as it cools.
- Weights in cupsOne pound of sugar is about 2 1/4 cups granulated; half a pound of butter is two sticks. A pint is 2 cups. The single cupful of flour is a thickener, not a batter base.
- Twelve yolksNineteenth-century eggs are generally reckoned to have run smaller than today's large ones, so ten large yolks may be nearer the mark. The whites will keep several days refrigerated for meringue or a sponge.
- SweetnessA pound of sugar to a pint of milk is very sweet by current taste, and the juice of two lemons is the only counterweight. Adding the grated zest of both lemons sharpens the flavour without touching the structure.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions signed with initials like this one, belongs to a genre of community cookbooks in which recipes circulated as family property rather than as tested formulas — hence the shorthand of "bake in paste" for a cook who already knew what paste was and how it behaved. The dish itself is far older than the book: English "cheesecakes" from the seventeenth century onward were small tarts filled with curd, often set with lemon juice or rennet, enriched with butter and yolks, and the name stayed attached to the form long after the curd stopped being made from actual cheese. Recipes of this type are often said to stand behind lemon curd tarts and the American cheesecake, which became a cream-cheese dish in the early twentieth century, after commercial soft cheeses became available in the later nineteenth.