Apple Cheesecakes
INGREDIENTS for 18 cheesecakes. -Sufficient apples to make 1/2 lb. when cooked, 1/4 lb. of sifted sugar, 1/4 lb. of butter, 4eggs, the rind and juice of 1 lemon, puff paste. AVERAGE COST, 1s. 8d.
Pare, core, and boil the apples to a pulp; add to these the sugar, the butter, which should be melted, the eggs, leaving out 2 of the whites, and the grated rind and juice of the lemon; stir well; line some pattypans with puff-paste; fill them with the mixture, and bake about 20 minutes.
TIME.-About 20 minutes.
SEASONABLE from August to March.
A lemon-and-apple curd baked in puff pastry cases, closer to a Yorkshire curd tart than to any modern cheesecake. The mixture is thin when raw, so the pastry cases must be able to hold it.
- The hinge: melted butter, cooledThe butter should be melted but no more than warm when it meets the eggs, or the yolks will curdle into threads before the tarts reach the oven. Beat it into the sweetened apple pulp first, then add the eggs.
- "Patty-pans"These are shallow tartlet tins, of varying size but generally small, on the order of 2-3 in. across. A 12-hole bun or muffin tin lined with puff pastry rounds works; the quantity as given fills about 18, so expect to bake in two batches.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives only a time, no heat: it does not describe the oven at all. As a modern equivalent, puff paste is usually baked hot, around 400-425F, which will set the filling and colour the pastry in twenty minutes. Blind-baking the cases for 8 minutes first gives a crisper base, since this filling is wet.
- Weights in modern terms1/2 lb. cooked apple pulp is about 225 g, which needs roughly 3/4 to 1 lb. of cooking apples before paring and coring. 1/4 lb. sifted sugar is about 115 g of caster sugar.
- The butter quantityThe amount of butter is not legible in this printing. A curd of this type is usually built on equal weights of butter and sugar, so 1/4 lb. (115 g) is consistent with the rest of the list.
- Two whites left outFour eggs but only two whites keeps the set soft and rich rather than rubbery. Save the spare whites for meringue; they will not improve this filling.
- ApplesBramley or another sharp cooker breaks to a pulp on its own. Dessert apples hold their shape and will leave the mixture lumpy, so cook them longer and sieve.
- Seasonable, and costAugust to March reflects the English apple harvest and cellar storage, not any modern limitation. The 1s. 8d. is Victorian household costing, included so a cook could budget.
Before the word settled on the baked cream-cheese cake, an English "cheesecake" meant a small open tart filled with a curd -- sometimes true milk curds, often, as here, a thick mixture of eggs, butter, sugar and fruit or lemon bound in the same way. Mrs Beeton's book carries several of them: apple, almond, lemon. The technique is the same one that produces lemon curd, poured raw into pastry and set in the oven rather than thickened in a pan, and it is generally traced to the medieval and early modern habit of baking sweetened curds in a crust. Eighteen tartlets from half a pound of fruit is thrifty baking dressed up for the tea table.