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Cheese Cake (Ozs cup butter 1 lb cups sugar)
4 ozs. (1/2 cup) butter I lb. (2 cups) sugar 4 eggs 4 ozs. (1 cup) flour 1/2 pint (I cup) milk 2 lbs. pot cheese I lemon Pastry Line a well-buttered casserole with pie crust. Beat the butter and sugar to a cream, then beat in the yolks of the eggs, add the flour, milk, cheese, grated lemon rind, and the stiffly beaten whites of the eggs. Bake for fifty minutes in a moderate oven. Allow it to cool in the casserole. Dust thickly over with powdered sugar.
A German-style baked cheesecake in a crust, sized for a deep dish rather than a springform. Two points do most of the work: the cheese must be dry and sieved, and the stated fifty minutes is optimistic for a filling this large.
- Pot cheesePot cheese is fresh, unripened curd — drier than modern cottage cheese and usually little or not at all salted. Dry-curd cottage cheese, farmer's cheese or well-drained quark are the closest substitutes; press out excess whey in a cloth and push the curd through a sieve or ricer so the filling is not lumpy. Cream cheese is not a substitute here: it is far richer and the batter will be too dense for the amount of milk given.
- The casseroleHere "casserole" means the ovenproof earthenware or glass baking dish itself, not a mixed dish of food — the recipe lines it with crust and cools the cake in it. Use something deep, roughly 2 1/2 to 3 quarts, and butter it well before lining with pastry — the filling is heavy and wet, and a shallow pie plate will overflow.
- Moderate oven350F. Set the dish on a low rack so the base of the crust firms before the custard sets.
- Baking timeFifty minutes may well be short for 2 lb of cheese plus a cup of milk in a deep dish. Allow for 70 to 90 minutes if needed, and judge by the centre: it should be just barely wobbly, around 150F on an instant-read thermometer. Overbaking past that point cracks the surface and weeps whey.
- SugarTwo cups to 2 lb of cheese is very sweet by current taste. Reducing to 1 1/4 cups works, and a good pinch of salt sharpens the lemon.
- PastryThe recipe assumes you have shortcrust already made; allow enough for a single deep-dish lining, roughly 10 to 12 oz of dough. Blind-baking the shell for 15 minutes before filling is not in the original but prevents a soggy base.
- Egg whitesFold the stiff whites in last and gently. They are the only lift in the cake, and beating them into the batter gives a flat, rubbery result.
- Cooling and yieldCooling in the dish is not optional — the filling continues to set as it drops to room temperature, and turning it out warm will collapse it. Dust with confectioners' sugar only once cold, or it dissolves. Serves 10 to 12.
Baked cheesecakes built on fresh curd rather than cream cheese are the older European form, and this one — pot cheese, lemon rind, whipped whites, a pastry lining, a thick veil of powdered sugar at the end — follows the German and Austrian Käsekuchen pattern that arrived in American cookbooks with Central European immigration through the nineteenth century. Pot cheese was a domestic staple in that era: soured milk drained in a cloth, made at home or bought cheaply from a dairyman, and used in everything from pierogi to pancakes. The recipe's presence in a book about casserole cookery reflects a moment when fireproof earthenware and, later, heat-resistant glass baking dishes were being marketed hard as vessels that could go from oven to table, and cookbooks of the kind set out to demonstrate that anything — including cake — could be cooked in one.