Subject: Anne Boleyn's cheesecake

From: [email-masked] (Jane Beckman)
Date: 25 Jun 93 00:33:12 GMT

Here's the recipe I promised, actually two:

Cheese Cakes, as made for Queen Anne Boleyn -- copied by
Pricess Victoria.  Kensington Palace, 1836, "from my ancient
Receipt Book"  [these recipes were copied in the future Queen
Victoria's hand, with notes on how much the "Queen Consort"
was fond of cheesecake and where Anne Boleyn also purchased
cheesecakes]

Put three quarts of creamy fresh milk to a quarter pint of
rennet.  Let it stand in a warm place, and when set, drain it
ghoroughly and mix into it with the hand half a pound of sweet
fresh butter.  Sweeten to palate with fine sugar and add a few
cleaned currants, a little citron and candied orange and lemon
peel, cut small, and an ounce of whitened and pounded Jordan
almonds.  Then beat up three eggs with the mixture.  Sheet the
pans with fine light pastry, fill them with the curd and bake
them in a swift oven.  The paste may be made with half a pound
of sifted flour, quarter pound of fresh butter, and cold
spring water, mixed lightly and rolled out.

Ye Cheese Cakes Beloved by Ye Queen Anne Boleyn 

Take three pints of sweet and new milk and boyle it and when
it boyles, put therein twelve egg yolks, but only half of the
whites, with a little salt.  Stir always over the fire till it
comes to the curd.  Then strain the whey from it through a
fine hair sieve.  When it be drained put it into a dish,
stirring in a protion of fresh butter and a pot of thick sweet
cream.  Season well with sack, rosewater, cleaned currants,
cinnamon, sugar and al other spices pleasing to the taste.

Half fill patty pans lined with puff pastry, and bake.
 
----
These are from a rather scarce book called "Court Favorites"
by Elizabeth Craig, London, 1953.  It was published from the
archives of the Royal Family, with the apparent blessing of
the present Queen Mother.  I hope the archives didn't go up
with the rest of Windsor Castle...
--
  Jilara   [[email-masked]]

"Every now and then, a big rock falls out of the sky, and everyone has 
a *very bad* day."  --from the PBS "Dinosaurs" special.

---

From: [email-masked] (Carey SCHNELL)
Date: Wed, 7 Jul 1993 08:44:59 GMT

Jane Beckman ([email-masked]) wrote:

: Cheese Cakes, as made for Queen Anne Boleyn -- copied by
: Pricess Victoria.  Kensington Palace, 1836, "from my ancient
: Put three quarts of creamy fresh milk to a quarter pint of rennet
                                                             ------
Do tell...

what is "rennet"????

Many thanks......

---

From: Gretchen Miller <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 7 Jul 1993 11:54:05 -0400

Rennet is what makes the cheese curdle.  It comes from the inner lining
(I believe) of a calf's stomach.  You can get fake/vegetable rennet at
yr local health food store or coop. In an emergency, you can substitute
lemon juice for rennet (though I don't know how it would work in the
Anne Bolyns cheesecake recipe).  I understand that lemon juice is the
standard way to curdle milk for Indian cooking.

toodles, gretchen

---

From: [email-masked] (David Adams)
Date: 7 Jul 93 11:23:50 CDT

In article [email-masked], [email-masked] (Carey SCHNELL) writes:
|Jane Beckman ([email-masked]) wrote:
|
|: Cheese Cakes, as made for Queen Anne Boleyn -- copied by
|: Pricess Victoria.  Kensington Palace, 1836, "from my ancient
|: Put three quarts of creamy fresh milk to a quarter pint of rennet
|                                                             ------
|Do tell...
|
|what is "rennet"????
|
|Many thanks...... 
|
|
|

Rennet is an enzyme used to curdle milk, in the process used to make cheese.
Rennet comes from the stomach lining of a cow or calf or goat etc.  (Does it
have to be a young animal?)

I understand that it doesn't take very much rennet to do the job.

And while we are on this subject, does anyone have any more information?

Who were the first peoples to make cheese?

---
David, N0WWN

--David C. Adams  Statistician  Cray Research Inc.  [email-masked]
     -Sourdough and Ham-              - Minnesotans for Global Warming! -
	(&gardner)

---

From: [email-masked] (Stephen Bloch)
Date: Wed, 7 Jul 1993 22:38:15 GMT

>Who were the first peoples to make cheese?

There's a good treatment of all this in the dairy chapter of McGee's book
"On Food and Cooking", which I highly recommend to all cooks, historic
and otherwise.  McGee spends about 600 pages explaining the biochemistry,
microbiology, and physics that make cooking work the way it does: how
bread goes stale, how yogurt, cheese, and ice cream get to be their
respective textures and flavors, how meringue becomes stiff, etc.  Check
out the electron photomicrographs of the various stages of cheesemaking.
I can't quote from it right now, since it and all my other books are
packed for moving, but I seem to remember that a teaspoon of rennet
will curdle something like a hundred gallons of milk.  You can do the
same thing with lemon juice, but it takes MUCH more of it (a teaspoon
of lemon juice, in my experience, curdles less than a gallon of milk).
And yes, it does have to be a young animal, specifically an unweaned
animal whose diet is predominantly milk.  Cows, like most humans, lose
the ability to digest milk in adulthood.

-- 
					Stephen Bloch
				    [email-masked]

---

From: [email-masked] ()
Date: 8 Jul 1993 01:35:48 GMT

In article <[email-masked]> Gretchen Miller <[email-masked]> writes:
>(I believe) of a calf's stomach.  ...

And if you want to know all about its use in practice, you can read
L. I. Wilder's _Little House in the Big Woods,_ which covers the whole
practice of cheesemaking, beginning with deciding who is going to kill
the calf to get the rennet....

Dorothy J. Heydt
UC Berkeley
[email-masked]

Disclaimer:  UCB and the Cozzarelli lab are not responsible for my
opinions, and in fact I don't think they know I have any.

---

From: [email-masked] (Karl E Vermillion)
Date: 8 Jul 1993 03:45:55 GMT

>|: Put three quarts of creamy fresh milk to a quarter pint of rennet
[snip]
>|what is "rennet"????
[snip]
>I understand that it doesn't take very much rennet to do the job.

I believe that most liquid rennet sold today has a strength of 1:10000,
that is, one part rennet will curdle 10,000 parts milk.  Using a quarter
pint of modern liquid rennet would certainly not give the desired results!
In years past, the stomach of the calf would be filled with water
for a while, and the resulting liquor used immediately for cheese making.
Alternately, the stomach would be dried, chopped into small bits, and the 
bits used at a later time.  Strength varied radically from batch to batch.

Junket rennet, occasionally found in the ice cream or dessert section of
your local supermarket, would probably give better results.  Junket rennet
is of a lower "strength", and while the curds produced are not good for 
cheese making, it is used to produce custard like desserts.

If anyone tries this, please let me know how it turns out.
-- 
Karl Vermillion
[email-masked]            "Never get out of the boat."

---

From: [email-masked] (David Adams)
Date: 8 Jul 93 11:38:07 CDT

So how much rennet do you get from one calf?  How do you get it?

---
David, N0WWN

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From: [email-masked] (David Friedman)
Date: Thu, 8 Jul 1993 19:13:31 GMT

One point with regard to "Anne Boleyn's Cheesecake..." So far, we do not
seem to have very good evidence that this is actually a sixteenth century
recipe from Anne Boleyn. If I remember the thread correctly, the recipe was
published by some member of the British royal family last century, ascribed
to Anne Boleyn. Royalty does not guarantee scholarship or care in
authenticating historical facts, and the early 19th century produced a good
deal of bogus history (clan tartans, for example). Does anyone recognize
the recipe as close to any of the published 16th century recipes?

David Friedman

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From: [email-masked] (R. Sharma)
Date: Fri, 9 Jul 93 09:15:12 GMT

Rennet is an extact containing enzyme "rennin" which is obtained from a
calf (it is usually present in the fourth stomach- yes cows have four
stomachs). The reason for extacting rennet from the young suckling calf
is that it contains higher proportion of the enzyme "rennin" than
"pepsin". As the animal grows the amount of pepsin increases while that
of rennin decreases. Pepsin can so the same job as rennin but the
product is much bitter, hence it is not acceptable.  There are
substitutes called microbial rennets which are commercially available.
Most of the microbial rennets are obtained from molds (fungi) and they
do the same job as the animal rennet.

regards

Ranjan