Almond Cheesecakes
INGREDIENTS for 12 cheesecakes.-4 oz. of sweet almonds, 3 bitter ones, 3 eggs, 2 oz. of butter, the rind of 1/4 lemon, 1 tablespoonful of lemon-juice, 3 oz. of sugar. AVERAGE Cost, 10d.
Blanch and pound the almonds smoothly in a mortar, with a little rosewater; stir in the eggs, which should be well beaten, and the butter, which should be warmed; add the lemon-peel grated fine, and juice, sweeten and stir well until the whole is thoroughly mixed. Line some patty-pans with puff-paste, put in the mixture and bake for 15 to 20 minutes in a quick oven.
TIME.-20 minutes, or rather less.
ALMOND ICING.
The recipe is a simple almond-and-egg tart filling, but it is built on bitter almonds, which is why it cannot be followed as printed. The notes below explain that and decode the rest of the period language.
- Bitter almonds are the problemBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the nut is crushed and wetted — exactly what pounding in a mortar does. They are not sold as food in the United States and are restricted elsewhere; Victorian cooks used them as a flavouring in small counts precisely because the flavour is strong, without any means of measuring the glycoside content of a given batch. Use a current cheesecake or almond tart recipe instead.
- Baking will not fix itBaking will not reliably fix it -- Oven heat does drive off and degrade some of the cyanide released in a wet almond paste, but the filling is a moist, pastry-enclosed mass and the amount destroyed in 15 to 20 minutes cannot be relied on. Treat baking as an unquantified reduction, not a safeguard.
- "A quick oven"A hot oven. Beeton gives no thermometer readings, so any figure is a modern editorial equivalent; the usual modern gloss for a quick oven is around 425–450F.
- Patty-pansShallow tartlet tins, close to a modern 12-hole bun or muffin tray with straight-ish sides. The recipe expects them lined with puff pastry, not a crumb base — nothing about this dish resembles a modern baked cheesecake, and there is no cheese in it at all.
- RosewaterUsed as the mortar lubricant so the almonds paste rather than oil. Modern rosewaters vary enormously in strength, so add cautiously.
- Average cost, 10d.Tenpence for the batch of twelve, as printed. The recipe assumes almonds bought whole and blanched at home.
- YieldTwelve small tartlets, as stated. They are rich and shallow — one each after a meal.
Almond "cheesecakes" belong to a long English line of small enriched tarts that kept the name long after the curd had gone. Early cheesecakes were genuinely made with curds pressed from milk; by the eighteenth century cooks were also making versions with ground almonds, eggs and butter, and the name attached to the shallow pastry case as much as to the filling. Bitter almonds function here as a concentrated aromatic used a few nuts at a time to sharpen the blander sweet almond. Their flavour compound, benzaldehyde, is what modern almond essence supplies synthetically.