Cheesecakes
There is a curious mistake going about -that the incomparable cheesecakes of Benreddin Hassan, which only he and his mother could make, were strewn with pepper. Sir Walter Scott, among others, makes this mistake in the "Heart of Midlothian." It is an error of precisely the same kind as one committed in regard to himself in the great encyclopædia of Larousse, where it is stated that as a boy he could not repeat his lessons unless his fingers were twirling one of the buttons of his waistcoat. The cheesecakes were strewn with grains of pomegranate and sugar; and Benreddin was beaten for a pretended fault-that he ought to have put pepper upon them, and did not.
Cheesecakes are now made with almost any kind of custard; but the following is the old orthodox method :- Take half a pound of dry curd, six ounces of sugar, six yolks of eggs, two ounces of butter, some nutmeg, salt, and the zest of two lemons. Pound all into a soft paste; distribute it into tartlet pans which have been lined with puff-paste; put citron-peel, currants, or sultanas on the top of each; and bake them in a moderate oven.
Beneath the literary quarrel is a compact eighteenth-century curd tart, closer to a Yorkshire cheesecake than to anything set with cream cheese. The whole method rests on the curd being genuinely dry.
- Dry curdThis means fresh pressed curd cheese with the whey worked out — farmer's cheese, dry-curd cottage cheese or a firm quark. Wet curd or supermarket cottage cheese will slacken the paste and the filling will weep in the pastry; drain it in muslin for several hours if in doubt.
- Moderate ovenRead this as 350F/180C. Small tartlets want a slightly firmer heat than a single large tart, so 350-375F is defensible if the shells are pale.
- WeightsHalf a pound of curd is 8 oz (about 225 g), six ounces of sugar is a scant cup (about 7/8 cup), two ounces of butter is half a stick. Six yolks against 8 oz of curd is a very rich ratio by modern standards and gives an almost custard-like set.
- Nutmeg and saltUnquantified in the original. A quarter teaspoon of freshly grated nutmeg and a scant quarter teaspoon of salt suit these proportions; the salt is there to lift the curd, not to be tasted.
- Pound into a soft pasteThe hinge of the recipe. Cream the butter and sugar first, then work in the curd until no lumps remain — a food processor or a sieve does in a minute what a mortar did in ten. Any curd lumps left will show as dry white specks in the baked filling.
- Lining the pansPuff paste in tartlet tins wants to be thin and well chilled, and the tins set on a preheated baking sheet so the base cooks through. There is no blind baking here, so a heavy sheet underneath is what keeps the bottoms from going soft.
- Timing and yieldNo time is given. Small tartlets take about 20-25 minutes; they are done when the filling is puffed and just set at the centre, and it will sink a little on cooling. Half a pound of curd fills roughly 12 to 18 tartlets depending on the tin.
- The fruit on topCitron peel, currants or sultanas go on before baking and will scorch if they sit proud of the filling. Press them in slightly, or scatter them under the surface.
The opening digression concerns Badr al-Din Hasan of the Thousand and One Nights, whose cream tarts were so famous that his identity is finally proved by his making them again — and who, in the tale, is beaten for having failed to strew them with pepper. Kettner's compiler is correcting a reading he attributes to Scott in The Heart of Mid-Lothian, insisting the garnish was pomegranate seeds and sugar and that the pepper was the invented fault, not the recipe. The dish that follows has nothing Arabian about it: it is the standard English curd cheesecake of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, made from the curd of soured or rennetted milk, enriched with yolks and butter and scented with lemon and nutmeg, and baked in small pastry cases rather than as one tart. Kettner's Book of the Table (1877), generally credited to the journalist E. S. Dallas, is built exactly this way throughout — an essay of literary and etymological gossip with a working formula tacked to the end — which is why the pomegranate seeds get more words than the oven does.