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Cheesed Butter Thins
Sprinkle Butter Thins lightly with grated cheese, seasoned with salt and a few grains cayenne. Place in the oven until crackers are crisp and cheese is melted.
A two-line recipe that assumes you already have a box of thin butter crackers in the pantry. The only thing that can go wrong is leaving them in too long.
- What "Butter Thins" wereThe capitalised name points to a commercial thin, plain butter cracker of the sort sold ready-made at the time. Any thin unsweetened water or butter cracker works, or a plain saltine if you skip the added salt.
- Oven heatThe original names no temperature. Use 350-375F on a sheet pan and expect two to five minutes; a hotter oven risks scorching the cheese before the cracker crisps.
- Watch, do not timePull them the moment the cheese has just melted and gone glossy. Cheese held past that point on a thin cracker turns greasy and tough as it cools.
- CheeseA dry, sharp grating cheese is what this wants: aged Cheddar, Parmesan, or a firm dry Jack. Pre-shredded cheese with anti-caking starch melts sluggishly and sits on top rather than fusing to the cracker.
- "A few grains cayenne"A period phrase for the smallest pinch, well under 1/8 teaspoon for a whole tray. Cayenne here is for warmth behind the cheese, not heat you can name.
- SaltSeason the cheese, not the cracker, and go light. Aged Cheddar and Parmesan are already salty, and many modern crackers are salted on top.
- Yield and servingFigure two or three per person alongside soup or a salad course. Serve warm; they lose their point once cold and will not re-crisp well.
Elizabeth O. Hiller's 52 Sunday Dinners (1913) is built around full menus, and small savoury accompaniments like this one exist to fill out a soup or salad course without adding another cooked dish. The recipe is really an assembly note: by the 1910s American cooks could buy thin butter crackers ready-made in cartons from the large biscuit companies, and cookbooks of the period routinely treated them as an ingredient rather than something to bake. Cheese-and-cayenne is the same seasoning logic behind cheese straws and Welsh rarebit, both long established in Anglo-American cooking, where a pinch of red pepper was the conventional foil to rich melted cheese. Dishes like this also mark the moment when the packaged-goods aisle began quietly editing the home recipe: the cook's contribution has shrunk to grating, seasoning and minding the oven.