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Maids of Honor
1 pint (2 cups) milk 1 dessertspoonful rennet 4 tablespoonfuls cleaned currants 4 tablespoonfuls whipped cream 2 yolks of eggs 2 ozs. (4 tablespoonfuls) sugar I pinch powdered cinnamon I pinch grated nutmeg 1/2 teaspoonful grated lemon rind 2 tablespoonfuls brandy Pastry 1 tablespoonful ground almonds Warm the milk slightly, add the rennet to it and let stand until a curd has formed. Put it in a coarse cloth on a sieve, and drain over night.
Next day press the curd lightly, and turn it into a basin. Add to it the yolks of eggs, cream, sugar, currants, almonds, brandy, cinnamon, lemon and nutmeg, and mix well. Line some tartlet tins with rich pastry rolled out rather thin, and fill them with the above mixture. Bake in a moderate oven for twenty minutes. Cool and sprinkle with sugar.
Maids of Honor are small lemon cheese cakes.
Richmond near London, claims this particular dainty as its specialty. This is what the village gossips have to say about them:
Way back in the mystic part of the 15th century some ingenious Richmond housewife concocted a wonderful recipe for making sweetened cheese cakes, and, thrifty housewife that she was, locked it in a strong box, against the onslaughts of borrowing neighbors. With almost anything else you could guess, "One of butter, two of sugar, three of flour and four of eggs," or something of the sort, and produce a creditable imitation, but with "Maids of Honor" it's different. Chemists have tried to analyze them, astrologers to cast their horoscopes, but one can do nothing of the sort. They defy detection; indeed, you don't really taste any cheese in them at all, and they seem to appear for the prime sensible purpose only of quickly disappearing under the motto "To be eaten."
Cakes One fine day Mistress Anne Boleyn found herself heiress to this precious recipe. That was when she was at the Court of Henry VIII, then on his progress through Reading. In those days kings had a way of happening around when least expected, and so when Mistress Boleyn and her honorable companion were feasting from her admirable baking, whiling away the time that the "King was in his counting house, Counting out the money; The Queen was in her pantry, Eating bread and honey," with nothing else to do, the little company suddenly found Bluff King Hal in their midst roaring out, "What have we here?"
Before they could answer him or hide away the feast, the Majesty of England sat him down, and, as the old chronicle has it, devoured "foarteen gode cakes withouten compunction!" much to the sorrow of the hungry maids of honor, who found little consolation in his approbation. So good did they taste he begged to know the name of the delicious cakes. "Your Majesty, they haven't any," Mistress Boleyn was forced to confess. "Then," cried the King, "since no name have they I shall stand sponsor to them; let them be called 'Maids of Honor' hereafter, so sweet they are," after which pretty compliment in payment for his feast he strolled out into his garden.
Naturally, the cakes immediately became the talk of the Court, and, years after, the recipe found its way back to "Richmond Towne."
An Edwardian rendering of the Richmond tartlet, built on a fresh rennet curd rather than any aged cheese. The curd is the whole dish, and it is the part most likely to go wrong.
- Rennet quantity and typeA dessertspoonful is 2 teaspoons, which suits the liquid animal rennet or junket-making rennet of the period. Modern double-strength liquid rennet is far more concentrated: follow the dose on the bottle for 2 cups of milk, or use one junket tablet dissolved in a little cool water.
- Milk temperature"Warm slightly" means blood-warm, around 100F; rennet works best in barely warm milk and is destroyed by hot milk, so do not overheat it. Pasteurised, homogenised milk generally gives a weaker, softer set than untreated milk would have.
- Drain in the refrigeratorThe original drains a fresh dairy curd overnight with no indication that it was kept cool. Set the sieve and cloth over a bowl and drain it in the refrigerator instead; the result is the same and the milk does not spend eight hours at room temperature.
- Curd yieldTwo cups of milk yields only a small amount of drained curd, roughly a third to half a cup. The filling is meant to be a thick, almost paste-like mixture, not a pourable custard.
- CurrantsThese are dried Zante currants, not fresh redcurrants or blackcurrants. "Cleaned" means picked over for stems and grit, a real chore when they were sold loose; packaged currants need only a rinse and a thorough drying.
- Whipped cream measureThe 4 tablespoonfuls are most likely measured after whipping, i.e. about 2 tablespoons of heavy cream beaten to soft peaks. Folding it in at the end keeps the filling lighter, though the original simply mixes everything together.
- OvenA moderate oven is 350F. Twenty minutes browns the pastry and just sets the yolks; the tops should puff slightly and stay pale gold.
- Pastry and yieldRich shortcrust rolled thin, lining shallow tartlet or muffin-top tins about 2 1/2 inches across. The quantity fills roughly 12. No blind baking is called for, and the stiff filling does not require it.
- The nameDespite "lemon cheese cakes," there is no cheese and no lemon juice, only grated rind. The cheese flavour comes entirely from the fresh curd, so the character of the dish depends on making it rather than substituting cream cheese.
Maids of Honour are genuinely a Richmond speciality, sold for generations by a Richmond bakery whose recipe was famously kept secret, which is the seed of most of the folklore around them. The Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII story recounted here is exactly that folklore, repeated in Victorian and Edwardian cookbooks as fact and traceable to no chronicle; the quoted "foarteen gode cakes" line is a piece of mock-antique invention rather than a source. What is documented is the underlying technique, which is medieval in character: a rennet curd, sweetened, spiced and enriched with egg yolks and almonds, baked in pastry. Tarts of this kind appear in English cookery from the fifteenth century onward, and the ancestry runs on into the modern curd tart of Yorkshire. That the author gives more space to the legend than to the method tells you what such a book was selling in its day: the story was half the appeal of the dish.