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Relish for Breakfast or Lunch
Take a quarter of a pound of good, fresh cheese; cut it up in thin slices and put in a spider, turning over it a large cupful of sweet milk; add a quarter of a teaspoonful of dry mustard, a dash of pepper, a little salt, and a piece of butter as large as a small egg; stir the mixture all the time. Take three Boston crackers or soda biscuits, finely powdered or rolled; sprinkle them in gradually ; as soon as they are stirred in, turn the contents into a warm dish and serve.
A stovetop cheese dish in the Welsh rarebit family, thickened with cracker crumbs instead of flour. It comes together in a few minutes and is unforgiving of high heat.
- The hinge: keep it below a simmerCheese melted in milk will break into rubbery strings and a greasy pool if it boils. Hold the pan over low heat, stir constantly as the original says, and pull it off the moment the crumbs are absorbed.
- SpiderA cast-iron frying pan, originally one with legs for standing over coals. Any heavy skillet or a small saucepan works; heavy metal buffers the heat, which matters here.
- "Good, fresh cheese"In this period this would most likely have meant a mild young factory cheddar — American cheese in the older sense — not a fresh curd cheese like ricotta. A mild or medium cheddar, grated rather than sliced, melts more evenly.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh unsoured milk, as opposed to the buttermilk or clabbered milk also kept in the house. Whole milk gives the best texture. A large cupful is around 8 to 10 fl oz.
- Butter as large as a small eggAbout 2 tablespoons, roughly an ounce.
- Boston crackersA round, hard, plain cracker of the common-cracker type, now hard to find. Three of them rolled fine yield roughly a third to a half cup of crumbs; unsalted saltines or water biscuits substitute, and you should add them gradually and stop when the mixture coats a spoon, since crumb absorbency varies.
- SeasoningA quarter teaspoon of dry mustard in this quantity is mild by modern taste. Mustard and pepper both sharpen melted cheese and can be increased without harm; salt cautiously, as the cheese and crackers both carry salt.
- Yield and servingEnough for two, or three at a light lunch. It sets as it cools, so the warm dish is not a nicety — serve at once, over toast or with more crackers.
Cheese melted with milk and mustard belongs to the broad rarebit tradition that American cookbooks absorbed from British ones through the nineteenth century, and that got a second life in the 1890s and 1900s with the fashion for chafing-dish cookery, where a hostess could make supper at the table over a spirit lamp. What marks this version as American is the thickener: Boston crackers, the hard round crackers generally traced to ship's biscuit and made throughout New England, stood in for the flour or egg used elsewhere and were a standard pantry staple. Such a preparation was understood as a savoury relish to fill out breakfast or a light midday meal, in an era when meatless suppers of cheese, eggs and crackers were routine household economy.