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Egg Cheese Cakes
Boil half a dozen eggs hard and lay them in cold water for a few minutes, and then peel them. Rub them, with six ounces of butter, through a fine wire-sieve, and mix in four ounces of well-washed and dried currants, two crumbled, stale sponge cakes, one teacupful of moist sugar, and a small quantity of grated nutmeg, moistening with the beaten yolks of two or three eggs and three-quarters of a wineglassful of brandy. Butter some small pattypans, line them with puff paste, trim, fill them with the mixture and bake in a quick oven. When cooked, turn them out of the pans, and serve either hot or cold.
Eggs, Duchess Style Pour into a saucepan with half a pint of water, four ounces of powdered sugar, a little lemon peel and a small stick of cinnamon, adding half a teaspoonful of orange-flower water and mix together. Beat the yolks of twelve eggs with one pint of milk or cream; add this to the syrup with a very little salt; transfer the whole to a baking-dish, place it on a hot stove, and cook the contents for ten minutes, stirring briskly. When it forms a cream, stir in the juice of a lemon, remove the dish from the fire, place it on another dish, and serve.
Two recipes have run together in this entry: small English-style egg "cheesecakes" baked in pastry, and a stirred lemon custard called Eggs Duchess Style. Read them as separate dishes.
- No cheese involvedDespite the name, nothing here is cheese. By the 18th and 19th centuries "cheesecake" was often used for a small rich tart baked in a pastry shell, curd or no curd, and this one is thickened with sieved hard-boiled egg.
- PattypansShallow individual tartlet or patty tins, only a couple of inches across. A standard 12-cup muffin tin or tartlet tray stands in; the mixture as written should fill roughly a dozen.
- Quick ovenA hot oven, on the order of 400-425°F. The puff paste needs that heat to lift and set before the egg filling weeps.
- Sieving the eggs and butterThis is the hinge of the first recipe. The yolks and whites must be pushed through a fine sieve with the butter until completely smooth, or the filling bakes grainy and streaked with rubbery white.
- CurrantsDried Zante currants, not fresh redcurrants or blackcurrants. Washing and drying them was necessary when they arrived dusty and stemmy; modern packaged currants need only a rinse if they are very dry.
- Moist sugar and old volume measuresMoist sugar is unrefined light brown sugar. A teacupful is roughly ¾ cup; a wineglassful is about 2 fluid ounces, so three-quarters of one is a scant 3 tablespoons of brandy.
- Stale sponge cakesTwo small individual sponge cakes of the sort baked in little moulds; the quantity is modest, a couple of ounces of crumb at most. Dry cake crumb absorbs the butter and brandy; fresh cake turns the filling pasty.
- The Duchess custardTwelve yolks to a pint of milk is a very rich stirred custard. Ten minutes of brisk stirring over direct heat is aggressive by modern practice; take it off between 175 and 180°F, and add the lemon juice only after it has thickened, since acid poured into a thin custard curdles it.
- Orange-flower waterStill sold, and still potent. A half teaspoon in a pint of custard is right; more tastes soapy.
The egg cheesecake belongs to a long English line of small sweet tarts — curd cheesecakes, lemon cheesecakes, almond cheesecakes — in which the word "cheesecake" had come to mean the pastry case and its rich filling rather than any dairy curd. English cookery books print versions built on eggs, butter, sugar, currants and brandy, and the formula was still circulating in Victorian household manuals. Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's celebrated maître d'hôtel, compiled his 1896 book from a wide range of sources, and this section shows the borrowing plainly: a homely English tartlet sits next to a French-titled custard, oeufs à la duchesse, flavored with orange-flower water and cinnamon in the manner of an older continental confectioner's kitchen. The two together are a fair picture of what a grand American hotel meant by cookery at the end of the century — English domestic tradition dressed in French names.