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Rice Cheese Cakes
Boil four ounces of rice in one-half gallon of water, dry it well, put it into another saucepan and add eight ounces of butter, one breakfast cupful of cream, one tablespoonful of orange-flower water, a small quantity of finely-chopped lemon peel and one-half pound of powdered sugar. Form the whole into a paste by adding half a dozen well-beaten eggs and stir over the fire until the mixture is thick; then move the pan from the fire and allow the mixture to cool. Have in readiness some patty-pans lined with puff-paste, place the rice mixture in them to about three-fourths their height, put them into a slack oven and bake for from fifteen to twenty minutes. When done remove, turn them out of the pans, and serve either hot or cold.
An English-style baked tart filling in the older sense of "cheesecake" — small pastry cases, no cheese at all. The one thing that will sink it is adding the eggs to a mixture that is still hot enough to scramble them.
- Temper the eggsThe rice, butter, cream and sugar mixture comes off the stove hot; six beaten eggs stirred straight in will curdle at the edges. Let it drop below about 140F, or beat a ladleful of the warm rice into the eggs first, then return everything to low heat and stir until it thickens.
- Boiling the riceFour ounces of rice (about two-thirds of a cup) in half a gallon of water is a generous amount of water — the grains cook loose and are then drained, not absorbed dry. "Dry it well" means draining thoroughly and returning it to the pan over low heat for a minute or two so no water thins the custard.
- A breakfast cupfulRoughly 8 to 10 fluid ounces; treat it as one cup of cream. Breakfast cups ran larger than teacups, which is why period books distinguish them.
- Slack ovenA slow oven, generally glossed as somewhere in the 275 to 325F range. Puff-paste shells in a low oven can turn pale and soft, so it is worth blind-baking the lined pans for 8 to 10 minutes at 400F first, then filling and finishing at 325F. Bake until the centers are set with only a slight wobble; at the lower temperature the recipe's 15 to 20 minutes may not be enough.
- Patty-pansSmall individual tart or tartlet tins, roughly 2 to 3 inches across — a standard muffin tin works. Fill three-quarters full as written, since the egg mixture rises a little.
- Orange-flower waterStill sold, but modern bottles vary widely in strength. One tablespoon of a concentrated brand will overwhelm the cream; start with a teaspoon, taste the cooled mixture, and add more.
- Butter and sugarEight ounces of butter is two sticks and a half pound of powdered sugar is about two cups sifted — rich and sweet by design. Modern confectioners' sugar contains cornstarch, which slightly firms the set; that is no obstacle here.
- YieldThe quantities make a large batch — on the order of a dozen to sixteen tartlets in a standard muffin tin, and more in smaller patty-pans. They turn out of the pans most cleanly after five minutes of resting.
"Cheesecake" in English cookery long meant any small enriched tart baked in pastry, and by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a great many of them contained no cheese: cookbooks of the period offer lemon cheesecakes, almond cheesecakes, potato cheesecakes and rice cheesecakes, all built on the same frame of butter, sugar, eggs and a starchy or nutty body in a puff-paste case. The name is generally traced to medieval curd tarts, with the curd gradually displaced by other thickeners while the word stayed put. Oscar Tschirky's compilation for the Waldorf gathers this sort of inherited European and English pastry work alongside the hotel's own dishes, and the orange-flower water and chopped lemon peel here are period markers o among aromatics in fine baking before vanilla extract became cheap and universal in American kitchens.