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Cream Curd Pie
1 pound of dry cheese curd (product of 4 quarts of milk curdled with rennet). 8 ounces of butter. 12 ounces of sugar. 4 whole eggs and 6 yolks. 1 cupful of milk. 4 ounces of currants. Nutmeg orange or other flavoring. Mash the curd through a seive and mix in the other ingredients. Bake in crusts.
A baked curd cheesecake in pastry, written for a bakeshop cook who already knew how to set curd and how hot his oven ran. The two gaps to fill are the cheese and the temperature.
- The curdFour quarts of whole milk set with rennet, drained and pressed, gives roughly a pound of dry curd. If you are not making it, use 1 lb of dry-curd cottage cheese, farmer cheese, or well-drained whole-milk ricotta pressed in a cloth until it no longer weeps. Wet curd will make the filling loose.
- Rennet todaySold as liquid animal rennet or vegetarian tablets; roughly a quarter of a tablet per gallon of milk at about 90F is a common dose, but follow the strength stated on the package rather than a fixed drop count. Do not use junket dessert tablets sweetened and flavored for puddings.
- Sieving is not optionalRennet curd is rubbery in the lump and will stay that way through baking. Press it through a fine sieve, or work it in a food processor until smooth, before anything else goes in.
- OvenNo temperature is given. Bake as a custard pie: about 350F until the center is set with a slight wobble, roughly 45 to 55 minutes for a deep pie. Higher heat cracks the surface and weeps.
- Ten eggs is not a misprintFour whole eggs plus six yolks is a rich, close-textured filling in the old cheesecake tradition. Eggs were not graded as they are now, so err on the small side if yours are jumbo.
- YieldThe batch runs to something like three and a half to four pounds of filling, enough for two deep 9-inch single-crust pies or three shallower ones. Blind-bake the shells lightly first so the base does not go soft under a wet filling.
- Currants and flavoringDried currants, not fresh; plump them in warm water or a little brandy and dry them before folding in. "Nutmeg orange" is most likely nutmeg and orange, probably grated zest; orange-flower water was another flavoring in use at the time, though this recipe does not name it.
- SugarTwelve ounces is about 1 3/4 cups. Sweet by modern standards for a cheese filling; cutting to 8 ounces gives a tarter pie, though it will bake slightly firmer.
Curd pies of this kind are the direct ancestors of American cheesecake and belong to a long English and continental line — Elizabethan "cheesecakes" were also curd, butter, eggs, sugar and currants baked in pastry, with no cream cheese anywhere in sight. Commercial cream cheese existed by the 1870s but a professional pastry cook of this period still expected to set his own curd with rennet. The instruction "bake in crusts," plural, may suggest that this book was written with more than a single family pie in view, and no oven temperature is given at all.