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Potato Cheese Cakes
Peel and thoroughly wash enough potatoes to weigh about six ounces when boiled, and mash them well. In the meantime, put a quarter of a pound of lemon peel into a saucepan of water and boil until quite tender; remove it and drain and place in a mortar with four ounces of finely-crushed loaf sugar and pound thoroughly. Place this mixture in a basin containing the mashed potatoes and stir them well together, adding four ounces of warmed butter and a little hot cream. Then have in readiness some small pattypans lined with a good puff paste and fill them a trifle more than half with the potato pulp, sprinkle over them a little powdered sugar, place them in a hot oven, and bake for thirty minutes. Take them out, turn the cheese cakes out of the pan and let them get cold, then serve.
A Victorian-style tart with no cheese in it at all: the filling is mashed potato enriched with butter, cream and a great deal of sweetened lemon peel. A few of the terms need translating before you start.
- The hinge: get the potato smooth and hotSix ounces of cooked potato is a small amount, and any lump or streak of unmashed potato will read as exactly that in the finished tart. Use a floury baking potato, rice or sieve it while still steaming, and beat in the butter and cream at once so nothing turns gluey.
- A quarter pound of lemon peelThat is the pared zest and pith of roughly four to six lemons, and it is the dominant flavour of the dish, not a garnish. Boiling it until tender softens it, but if you want it less bitter, change the water once or twice during the boil.
- Loaf sugar and powdered sugarLoaf sugar came as a hard refined cone that cooks crushed themselves; granulated sugar is the direct equivalent, and pounding it with the peel in a mortar makes a coarse candied paste. The "powdered sugar" sprinkled on top means finely ground sugar, closer to today's caster sugar than to cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar.
- PattypansSmall shallow tart tins, about 2 to 2 1/2 inches across. A standard 12-cup muffin tin or a tray of tartlet moulds does the job; the quantities given should fill roughly a dozen small tins, depending on their size.
- "A hot oven"With no thermometer, this is usually taken to mean somewhere around 400-450F; the book gives no figure. Puff pastry does want good heat to rise, but thirty minutes at the top of that range will darken small tartlets well past pleasant. Watch them from about 18 minutes and pull them when the pastry is set and deep gold.
- Fill only half fullFill a trifle more than half -- The instruction is deliberate. Puff paste lifts as it bakes and the filling swells slightly; overfilled pattypans spill and then weld the tarts to the tin.
- Unmould warm, serve coldTurn them out while the tin is still hot or the butter in the filling will set and grip. They are meant to be eaten fully cooled, when the lemon comes forward and the texture firms up.
Sweet potato "cheesecakes" were a standing item in English cookery books from the eighteenth century onward, and they explain a word that now looks like a mistake: a cheesecake originally meant any small rich tart, named for the curd filling of the medieval version, and cooks went on calling it that long after the curd had been replaced by almonds, lemon, or, as here, mashed potato. The potato is doing the work that curd or ground almond once did, carrying butter and sugar in a soft, sliceable body for very little money. Its appearance in Oscar Tschirky's 1896 collection is characteristic of the book, which gathers a great deal of inherited European and English hotel-kitchen material alongside the dishes the Waldorf itself made famous, and preserves older domestic formulas with their period vocabulary of pattypans, loaf sugar and puff paste intact.