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Lemon Cheese Cakes
Yolks of sixteen eggs, one pound sugar, three-quarters pound butter, four lemons, boiling rinds twice before using, two tablespoonfuls powdered cracker. Bake in paste.--Mrs. Dr. E.
Lemon Cheese Cakes.
Mix and gently melt four ounces of sugar and four ounces of butter; add yolks of two eggs, white of one; grated rind of three lemons, juice of one and a half lemon, one small Savoy or sponge biscuit, some almonds blanched and pounded, three spoonfuls brandy. Mix well and bake in rich pastry.--Mrs. V. P. M.
Lemon Cheese Cakes.
Yolks of eight eggs or yolks of five and whites of three, one-half pound sugar, a lump of butter, juice of one lemon and grated rind of three. Bake in rich pastry--Miss D. D.
Three contributors' versions of the same thing: a lemon curd baked in pastry, in quantities that range from a party's worth to a small tart. None of them contains cheese.
- What "cheese cake" means hereThese are curd tarts in the older English sense — a rich lemon-and-egg filling baked in a pastry case, of the kind still sold as Yorkshire curd tarts and maids of honour. No cheese of any sort is involved, and no cream cheese should be added in an attempt to make it behave like a modern cheesecake.
- The hinge: keep the heat lowThis is a butter-and-yolk custard and it will curdle if taken too hot. The recipes give no oven temperature; a moderate oven, around 325F, and pulling the tarts while the centres still wobble slightly will serve, as they firm on cooling. A fierce oven will scramble the filling.
- Boiling the rinds twiceMrs. Dr. E. is the only contributor to specify it. Two changes of boiling water draw the bitterness out of the white pith before the peel goes into the mixture -- a real technique rather than fussiness, given how much peel four lemons yield.
- Powdered crackerPlain unsalted soda or water crackers, crushed fine. They act as the binder and stop the curd weeping. Two tablespoons of dry fine breadcrumbs or a scant tablespoon of cornstarch does the same job in a filling of that size.
- Savoy biscuitA crisp finger-shaped sponge biscuit — a ladyfinger or savoiardi. Crumble one to powder; it plays the same thickening role as the cracker in the first version.
- "A lump of butter"Genuinely unspecified in Miss D. D.'s recipe. The other two run from equal weights of butter and sugar (Mrs. V. P. M., 4 oz each) to three parts butter to four of sugar (Mrs. Dr. E., 3/4 lb to 1 lb), which would put her half-pound of sugar against somewhere between 6 and 8 oz of butter.
- Bake in pasteLine small tart tins with a short or puff pastry; blind-baking the shells before filling helps keep the wet curd from leaving the base raw. What the contributors meant by "rich pastry" is not spelled out here.
- Quantities and yieldSixteen yolks, a pound of sugar and three-quarters of a pound of butter is a banquet batch — enough filling for three to four dozen small tarts. Mrs. V. P. M.'s version, on two yolks and a white, fills about a dozen; scale from that one for a household.
- Leftover whitesAll three recipes are yolk-heavy, which is what makes the curd dense. The whites keep several days refrigerated; meringues, macaroons and white cakes are the obvious uses, though nothing in the text says what these cooks did with them.
Curd tarts of this kind appear to have come to Virginia out of the English domestic tradition, where "cheesecakes" were small filled pastries whose original curd — real drained milk curd — had by the eighteenth century been quietly replaced in many households by lemon, butter and egg yolks, keeping the old name. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1877), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by some 250 Virginia housewives, prints three of them side by side under the same heading and credits each to its donor by initials, which is exactly how the book works: it is a collection of neighbours' manuscript receipts rather than a single authored text, and the variation between the versions is the point. Mrs. Dr. E.'s enormous sixteen-yolk batch may also say something about post-war Virginia kitchens, where one might guess eggs were plentiful from one's own yard while refined sugar and lemons had to be bought — though that reading is speculation.