Creaprecies
Line out shallow patty pans with scraps of best paste rolled in a sheet, place a piece of bread in each and bake them in a cool oven; when baked remove the bread and place in a teaspoonful of red currant or some other jellies or jam; next cover this with some cheese cake preparation or with a custard that will set. Next have ready a little meringue, made in the usual manner from the whites of eggs and sugar, place a tablespoonful on each, bringing it up cone form; sprinkle a little pink sugar on this and return them to the oven, just to color them a light brown?
A Victorian assembly job: blind-baked tartlet shells layered with jam, then a set custard or curd filling, then meringue. Nothing is difficult, but the order and the oven heats matter.
- Patty pansShallow tartlet tins roughly 2 to 2 1/2 inches across, of the sort sold now as mini muffin or tartlet pans. Scraps of "best paste" means offcuts of puff or rich short pastry, gathered and rolled once into a sheet rather than re-kneaded.
- The bread is a baking weightA cube of stale bread pressed into each lined tin does the work of pie weights, holding the sides up and the base flat. Dried beans or ceramic weights over a scrap of parchment do the same and are easier to lift out.
- "A cool oven"Conventionally rendered as something like 250 to 300F. The shells want to dry and set pale rather than color, since they go back into the oven again.
- Cheese cake preparationIn nineteenth-century usage this is a sweetened fresh-curd mixture — drained curd or cottage cheese beaten with egg, sugar and butter — not a modern cream-cheese batter. A plain baked custard of 1 egg to 1/2 cup milk with sugar sets just as well and is more predictable in so small a tin.
- Set the filling before the meringueThe original relies on a filling that "will set" and returns the tartlets to the oven only once. In modern practice it is safer to bake the custard or curd layer until firm and let it cool before topping, since meringue spread over a wet, unset filling weeps and slides off in the oven.
- The meringueThe recipe gives no quantities; "in the usual manner" means whites beaten with sugar to firm glossy peaks, in ratios that varied widely in period recipes from about 2 tablespoons of sugar per white upwards.
- Pink sugarTinted sugar, most likely colored with cochineal, which was the usual kitchen red of the period; colored sanding sugar is a workable equivalent. It is decoration only.
- The final browningThe original says only to return them to the oven "just to color them a light brown." A brisk oven for a few minutes, watched closely, will do it without drying the meringue to chalk or melting the jam layer beneath.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities; a handful of pastry scraps will line a small batch of tins. Serve the day they are made; the meringue softens overnight and the pastry goes damp from the jam.
These belong to the family of English "cheesecakes" — small curd-filled tartlets, a term used for the pastry rather than for any large cake, and one that predates the American cheesecake by centuries. The layered construction here (jam at the bottom, set custard over it, meringue piled on top) is the same idea as a Manchester or Queen of Puddings, scaled down to a single mouthful, and it makes use of leftover pastry scraps so that nothing rich went to waste. The pink sugar is characteristic of the period, when cochineal was the standard kitchen red. The garbled title appears to be a transcription artifact of the printed page rather than any known dish name.