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German Pot-cheese Cake
1 cup butter 1 cup sugar 3 eggs 1 cup pot-cheese 1 cup grated breadcrumbs Grating of lemon-rind½ teaspoonful vanilla 1 teaspoonful salt Cream the butter and sugar well together.
Separate the eggs, adding the yolks one at a time, then the flavoring, and beat the mixture until very light. Stir in the pot-cheese and grated breadcrumbs. Fold in the stiffly beaten whites. Bake in a moderate oven.
Cheese and Fish Soufflé Cook half a cup of bread-crumbs to a paste in half a cup of rich milk, and stir in half a cup of mild cheese, grated. To the yolks of two eggs add a little mustard, salt, cayenne, few drops of Worcestershire, half a teaspoonful lemon-juice, a little minced parsley, and half a cup of cooked fish, flaked. Add to first mixture and let cool. Fold in the stiffly beaten whites of two eggs. Set in a pan ⚫of hot water and bake about twenty-five minutes.
A crustless baked cheesecake bound with breadcrumbs rather than flour, from the chapter on using up stale bread. The original assumes you know the pan, the time and the doneness test, so those need filling in.
- Pot-cheesePot-cheese is a fresh, dry-curd cheese, closest today to farmer's cheese or dry-curd cottage cheese. If you only have ordinary creamed cottage cheese, drain it well in a sieve and press it, or the batter will be too wet to set; ricotta drained overnight also works.
- BreadcrumbsThese are grated crumbs from dry stale bread, not fresh soft crumbs and not packaged seasoned crumbs. Grate the crust off first and sieve the crumbs so no coarse pieces remain, since they are the only structure the cake has.
- Moderate oven350F. The cake has no flour and no chemical leavening, so it rises on beaten egg white alone and will sink somewhat as it cools.
- Pan and timeA buttered 8- or 9-inch springform or deep cake pan, baked 45 to 55 minutes, until the top is set and lightly browned and the centre barely trembles. A water bath is not called for here but does give a smoother texture.
- The saltA full teaspoon reads high for a cake of this size by current taste. With salted butter, half a teaspoon is closer to what a modern palate expects.
- FoldingAdd the yolks one at a time as directed and beat thoroughly, but fold the whites in with a light hand at the very end. Overworking at that stage is one common reason this style of cake bakes dense and heavy.
- Yield and servingEight to ten small slices. Cool completely in the pan before turning out, and serve plain or with stewed fruit; it is firmer and less sweet than a modern cream-cheese cheesecake.
Baked cheese cakes made from fresh soured curd belong to a long central European tradition, the German Käsekuchen and its Austrian and Polish relatives, built on the cheese a household could make itself from milk that had turned. In American cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that curd goes by the name pot-cheese, usually explained as a reference to its being made in a pot, and it was made at home as well as bought. What makes this version belong in a book of left-overs is the cup of grated breadcrumbs standing in for flour: stale bread was too valuable to throw out, and crumbs were a common thrift substitute in puddings, cakes and coatings alike. The recipe is a fair picture of a period in which two things likely to be sitting in the larder, dry bread and a bowl of curd, were made to add up to dessert.