Lemon Cheesecakes
INGREDIENTS for 2 dozen cheesecakes.-¼ lb. of butter, 1 lb. of loaf sugar, 5 eggs, the rind of 2 lemons and the juice of 3. AVERAGE COST, 1s. 2d.
Put all the ingredients into a stewpan, carefully grating the lemon-rind and straining the juice. Keep stirring the mixture over the fire until the sugar is dissolved and it begins to thicken; when of the consistency of honey, it is done; then put it into small jars and keep in a dry place.
This mixture will remain good 3 or 4 months. When made into cheesecakes, add a few pounded almonds, or candied peel, or grated sweet biscuit; line some pattypans with good puff-paste, rather more than half fill them with the mixture and bake for about 1 hour in a good brisk oven.
TIME.- hour.
SEASONABLE at any time.
Lemon Cheesecakes. (To Keep.) INGREDIENTS for sufficient to fill 2 dozen cheesecakes.-6 lemons, 4 eggs, 6 oz. of butter, 1 lb. of loaf sugar. AVERAGE COST, 1s. 8d.
Grate the rind of the lemons and squeeze the juice of all, add the eggs and the sugar and after mixing thoroughly put in a jug; put the jug in a saucepan of boiling water and stir one way till the mixture is of a smooth paste. When quite cold, cover closely and it will keep good a fortnight or longer in cold weather.
TIME.-20 minutės.
SEASONABLE at any time.
Both entries are lemon curd — a cooked mixture of eggs, butter, sugar and lemon — intended as a filling for small pastry cases. The cooking is sound; the storage directions are the problem.
- Why the keeping instructions failThe first version tells you to pot the curd in jars, keep it in a dry place and use it over three or four months. This is an egg-and-butter mixture heated only until it thickens, then sealed with no processing, no measured temperature and no refrigeration. The acidity of the lemon juice limits some hazards, but an unprocessed egg-and-dairy preserve held at room temperature for months is liable to spoil, and current guidance for homemade lemon curd is refrigerated or frozen storage rather than ambient. The second version's "a fortnight or longer in cold weather" assumes an unheated larder that no modern kitchen has.
- If you want lemon curd that keepsUse a current tested recipe with stated finishing temperature and either refrigerated or frozen storage. Do not adapt these directions.
- Loaf sugarRefined sugar sold in a hard cone, broken up and crushed before use. Ordinary granulated sugar is the equivalent; the weight, 1 lb, is unchanged.
- Stewpan and jugA stewpan is simply a saucepan with straight sides. The jug standing in a pan of boiling water in the second recipe is a makeshift double boiler, and the gentler method of the two — direct heat on an egg mixture curdles it quickly.
- PattypansSmall shallow tartlet tins, roughly the size of a modern bun or mince-pie tin. Twenty-four of them is what the quantities are pitched at.
- "A good brisk oven"Conventionally read as somewhere in the region of 400-450F, though Victorian oven terms were not standardised. The stated hour is longer than tartlets this size need to set, and prolonged baking at brisk heat would darken the filling. The "TIME.- hour" line is garbled in the original, as is "20 minutės" in the second entry.
- Cost1s. 2d. and 1s. 8d. are shillings and pence, quoted for the full two dozen — a reminder that butter and sugar in this quantity were a considered expense, not a casual one.
Lemon cheesecakes of this kind contain no cheese, and by Beeton's day the name was already a fossil. Early English cheesecakes were built on curds pressed from milk; over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the fillings drifted towards rich egg-and-butter mixtures flavoured with lemon, almonds or candied peel, keeping the old name for the shape of the thing — a small pastry case with a set filling — rather than its contents. What Beeton describes in the first entry is what later cooks called lemon curd or lemon cheese. The additions offered at the end — pounded almonds, candied peel, grated sweet biscuit — echo the older cheesecake tradition, in which ground almonds and crumbs were used to give such fillings body.