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English Cheesecakes
12 ounces of sweet rennet curd. 4 ounces of sugar. 3 ounces of butter. 4 yolks of eggs. Pinch of salt. 1/2 a nutmeg grated. Lemon extract to flavor. To prepare the curd see number 303. Rub the curd as taken from the draining cloth through a flour seive and mash it smooth. Add the other ingredients and pound them all together. Line patty pans with tart paste and nearly fill them with the mixture. Bake about 15 minutes. The curd mixture though seemingly too firm at first melts and puffs up in the oven. Powdered sugar over the tops. Puff Paste and Cheese, or Rame quins.
To be served with stewed fruit. Make puff paste, but not the richest--using about 12 ounces of butter to a pound of flour. When it has been rolled and folded twice, the shortening being all in, roll it out again and spread grated cheese all over it with the palette knife. Fold and roll out and spread cheese on it again and then once more. When it has been folded 5 times in all roll it out thin, cut in squares about 2 1/2 inches wide, double these squares over something like split rolls, egg over and bake. A small piece cut from the pie paste when making may be enough to answer this purpose.
Two related items run together here: a curd cheesecake in the old English sense, and a cheese puff paste to serve alongside stewed fruit. Both assume a pastry cook's larder and a coal oven, so a few things need translating.
- Sweet rennet curd is the whole dishThis is milk set with rennet (junket) and drained in a cloth — a fresh, mild curd, not cream cheese and not ricotta. Whole-milk ricotta drained overnight in muslin is the closest supermarket stand-in; cottage cheese is too wet and too sour. The book's cross-reference to "number 303" is to its own curd instructions, not printed on this page.
- 12 ounces is weightWeigh the curd after draining, not before. Twelve ounces of drained curd starts from roughly two quarts of milk, and the yield varies with how hard you press it.
- Oven heatFifteen minutes for small tarts implies a fairly brisk oven; the book gives no temperature or oven term, so a figure around 400F is a modern estimate rather than a stated equivalent. Too slow an oven and the filling is more likely to exude whey than to puff.
- Patty pansShallow individual tart tins, roughly the size of a modern muffin or tartlet pan. The book gives no size or yield; the quantity of mixture will fill about a dozen small shells, depending on how large the pans are.
- "Pound them all together"The instruction is literal: the mixture wants to be worked smooth in a mortar or, now, a food processor. Lumps of curd will not melt out in fifteen minutes, which is why the recipe sieves the curd first.
- Half a nutmeg is a lotHalf a whole nutmeg over 12 ounces of curd is roughly a teaspoon to a teaspoon and a half grated — assertive by current taste. Start with half that if you want the lemon to read.
- Lemon extractPeriod lemon extract was strong oil of lemon in alcohol. A teaspoon of modern extract, or better the zest of one lemon, gives the intended flavour.
- The cheese paste ratioTwelve ounces of butter to a pound of flour is a three-quarter-butter puff — the recipe says outright it should be "not the richest." Any hard grating cheese works; the book does not specify one.
- Folding the cheese inThe cheese goes in only after all the butter is incorporated, spread on three separate rollings, for five folds total. Chill between folds or the cheese fat and butter will merge and you lose the layers.
Curd cheesecakes are one of the oldest surviving English sweet pastries, made wherever a household set milk with rennet — the Yorkshire curd tart is the same idea with currants added, and it is traditionally associated with Easter and Whitsun, when spring milk was plentiful. What distinguishes them from later American cheesecakes is that the cheese is made for the purpose rather than bought: rennet curd is bland, fresh and barely acidic, so the nutmeg and lemon carry the flavour. The second item, "rame quins," preserves an older sense of the word: through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a ramequin meant a small baked cheese pastry or cheese savoury, not the porcelain dish it now names — the dish appears to have taken its name from the preparation. The word reached English through French from a Low German or Flemish diminutive, though the derivation is not settled.