Cheese Cakes
Juice and grated rind one lemon 1/4 cup almonds, blanched and chopped ¼ teaspoon salt Scald sweet and sour milk, strain through cheese cloth. To curd add sugar, yolks of eggs slightly beaten, lemon, and salt. Line patty pans with paste, fill with mixture , and sprinkle with chopped almonds. Bake until mixture is firm to the touch.
This is an old-style curd tart: fresh cheese made on the spot by scalding milk, drained, then bound with egg and baked in small pastry shells. The curd-making step is the whole recipe, and it is where most of the work lies.
- Making the curdSweet and sour milk are heated together until the acid in the soured milk breaks the fresh milk into curds and whey; scald means bringing it to just below a simmer, around 180-185F, not boiling. If you have no genuinely soured raw milk, cultured buttermilk is the closest working substitute for the acid portion.
- StrainingLine a sieve with damp cheesecloth and let the curd drain until it stops dripping freely, roughly 30 minutes. Drain too far and the filling bakes dry and crumbly; too little and it weeps into the pastry.
- Patty pansThese are small shallow tart or muffin tins, about 2 1/2 to 3 inches across. Modern muffin tins work, though the deeper cups give a thicker filling that needs longer in the oven.
- "Paste"The recipe does not specify which; plain pie pastry works well here, though puff paste was also used for small tarts of this kind. Line the tins and chill them while the curd drains so the shells hold their shape.
- OvenThe recipe gives no temperature, only "bake until mixture is firm to the touch"; a moderate oven is the usual reading for a custard-type filling. Firm to the touch means the centre no longer wobbles; a curd filling taken much beyond that will crack and turn grainy.
- Blanching almondsCover shelled almonds with boiling water for a minute, drain, and the skins slip off between finger and thumb. Chop them coarsely so they toast on top rather than sinking in.
- LemonGrate the rind before juicing, and take only the yellow zest. The rind carries most of the flavour here, the juice mainly sharpens the curd.
- YieldThe milk, sugar and egg quantities are missing from the text as it survives here, so the number of tarts cannot be fixed from the recipe. They are best eaten the day they are baked, and should be refrigerated if kept overnight.
Despite the name, these are not cheesecake in the modern sense but the older English curd tart, a small pastry case filled with fresh unripened cheese, eggs, sugar and lemon. The form is centuries old in Britain, where dairying households made curd from surplus milk and baked it in short crust; Yorkshire curd tarts, sometimes with currants, are the best-known surviving version. The recipe survives into an American cooking-school book of this era because milk still soured usefully in most kitchens rather than simply spoiling, and turning a pan of it into curd was routine domestic economy rather than a project.