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Cheese Cakes
or Sift a cupful and a half of cottage cheese; add one-third of a cupful of sugar, four tablespoonfuls of cream, one tablespoonful of melted butter, the juice of a lemon and three beaten eggs; beat until smooth. Bake in small tins lined with pastry until the mixture is well puffed. Serve when partly cooled, with preserved cherries or other fruit.
A plain baked cheese custard in pastry, closer to a Continental quark tart than to the dense cream-cheese cakes that came later. The original gives no oven temperature and no yield, so both need filling in.
- "Sift" the cheeseThis means pressing the curd through a fine sieve or ricer, not measuring it through a flour sifter. Commercially packed cottage cheese is generally wet; drain it in cheesecloth for an hour first, or the filling may weep in the shell.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. Bake at 350F: hot enough to set the custard and puff it, cool enough to keep the eggs from curdling. The tarts are done when the centres barely tremble, around 170-175F internally.
- The puff is temporary"Until the mixture is well puffed" is the visual cue, but the rise is steam and beaten egg, and it falls as the tarts cool. Do not keep baking in hope of holding it; that only overcooks the custard and cracks it.
- Lemon juice"The juice of a lemon" is roughly 2 to 3 tablespoons, and lemons vary widely. Start with 2 tablespoons if you want the cheese flavour forward.
- CreamUnqualified "cream" in books of this period covered a range of fat contents and was not standardised; heavy cream gives the firmest result, half-and-half a looser set.
- Small tinsStandard muffin cups or 3-inch tartlet tins. The quantity fills about twelve; allow 20-25 minutes at 350F, less for shallow tins.
- The pastryAn unbaked short crust will go soggy under a wet filling. Line the tins, chill them well, and blind bake 10 minutes before filling.
- Serving"Partly cooled" is right, and worth following: warm from the oven the custard is still slack, and fully chilled it goes rubbery. Room temperature with cherries in syrup is the intended effect.
Cheesecakes of this kind are much older than the American cream-cheese versions that displaced them, and the name long meant a small pastry case filled with a sweetened fresh-cheese custard rather than a large cake. English and Continental cookbooks of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are full of them, usually built on curd made at home from soured milk or from milk set with rennet. In that world a household with a cow or a daily milk delivery had curd to spend. The instruction to sift the cheese survives from it, where the curd was uneven and had to be pushed through a sieve to make anything smooth; commercially packed cottage cheese gradually made the step feel optional.