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Corn-Starch Cheese Cakes
Juice and rind of three lemons, three cupfuls water, three cupfuls sugar, three eggs, three tablespoonfuls corn starch, two tablespoonfuls butter. Boil the water, nix the corn starch with a little cold water and pour on the boiling water. Let it boil up once and then pour it on the butter and sugar. After it cools add the lemons and eggs.--Miss D.D.
This is a lemon curd thickened with cornstarch rather than yolks alone, intended as the filling for small pastry tarts. The original assumes you already know that part, so read it as a component recipe.
- What "cheese cakes" means hereNo cheese is involved. Lemon "cheese" was the nineteenth-century word for lemon curd, and "cheese cakes" are individual pastry shells filled with it. The recipe gives no pastry and no yield; you will need short-crust shells, and this quantity fills a good many.
- The hinge: the eggsThe eggs go in only after the cornstarch base has cooled. If you add them while the base is hot you will get threads of scrambled egg. Beat them first and stir them in off the heat. The recipe then simply stops; it gives no further cooking.
- It is not finished when the recipe stopsAs written the filling contains raw egg and no baking instruction. Spoon it into blind-baked shells and bake until the centres are just set and no longer liquid, or cook the filling in a double boiler until it thickens and coats a spoon before filling cooled shells.
- OvenThe original gives no oven instruction at all. If you bake it, blind-bake the pastry hot (around 400F) and finish the filled shells gently, 325-350F; higher heat will curdle the egg and weep liquid into the crust.
- CupfulsTake the cup as 8 fl oz. Three cups of water to three cups of sugar makes a generous quantity — comfortably more than a quart of filling. Halve it for a smaller batch.
- Rind"Rind of three lemons" means the zest, not the white pith, which is bitter. A microplane gets it finer than any period grater; if you prefer, steep coarse peel in the hot base and strain it out.
- Cornstarch slurryMix the cornstarch with two or three tablespoons of cold water until smooth, then combine with the boiling water. The single boil-up called for is enough to gelatinize it; prolonged boiling thins cornstarch back down.
- KeepingThe finished filling holds four or five days covered in the refrigerator. Fill the shells the day they are served or the pastry softens.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by some 250 Virginia housekeepers, prints most of its recipes exactly as they arrived, initials and all — hence "Miss D.D." Lemon cheesecakes descend from a much older English line of curd tarts in which fresh cheese or curds really were the filling; as citrus and sugar grew cheaper through the eighteenth century, a lemon-and-butter custard took the place of the curd but kept the name. The cornstarch here marks the recipe as distinctly late-century: commercial corn starch became a common American pantry item after the 1840s and 1850s.