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Cheese Drops
Add to 3 1/2 tablespoons flour, 2 tablespoons melted Crisco, and blend together until smooth. Remove from fire, add 4 tablespoons grated cheese, 1/4 teaspoon salt, and a dash of red pepper. Fold in stiffly beaten whites of 3 eggs, and drop from end of spoon on a Criscoed baking sheet about 1 inch apart, and bake from 12 to 14 minutes in a moderate oven. Serve hot in folded napkin with salad course.
A cheese soufflé batter baked in small spoonfuls — closer to a gougère than a cookie. The text as printed is missing its opening line, so read the notes before starting.
- The missing first ingredient"Add to 3 1/2 tablespoons flour" has no antecedent, and "remove from fire" makes no sense without something on the fire. What is missing is a liquid, almost certainly scalded milk, into which the flour and fat are cooked to a thick paste. The quantity is not recoverable from the printed text; something in the region of half a cup would suit these proportions. Without a liquid you have dry flour and shortening, not a batter.
- Order of workThe printed text has the flour and the melted fat added to the hot liquid and blended smooth, then taken off the fire for the cheese and seasoning. Cooking the flour and fat together first and then adding the milk, stirring until the paste leaves the side of the pan, gives the same result and is easier to control. Either way, let the paste cool to lukewarm before folding in the whites, or they collapse.
- CriscoCrisco is hydrogenated vegetable shortening, and this book was written to sell it. Butter works better here and gives more flavour; use the same quantity. "A Criscoed baking sheet" means simply greased.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350-375°F; the book gives no temperatures, so this is a modern equivalent rather than a stated one. Twelve to fourteen minutes is right for drops the size of a teaspoon; they should be puffed and lightly coloured. Do not open the door in the first eight minutes.
- The cheese"Grated cheese" in American cookbooks of this period usually implies a dry, hard cheese for grating, typically an aged Cheddar. Four tablespoons is roughly an ounce, which is modest; the drops are meant to be delicate rather than strongly cheesy.
- Red pepperCayenne, not paprika and not a fresh chilli. A dash is about an eighth of a teaspoon; it is there to sharpen the cheese, not to register as heat.
- Yield and timingThree whites and this quantity of paste should give somewhere around two dozen small drops, depending on spoon size. They deflate within minutes of leaving the oven, so bake them immediately before the course they accompany.
- Serve hot in folded napkinA linen napkin folded over the drops in a serving dish keeps them warm and absorbs steam. A cloth-lined basket does the same job.
A Calendar of Dinners belongs to a genre that flourished in the 1910s: the cookbook published by a manufacturer to teach cooks to use a new product. Crisco appeared on the American market in 1911, and the recipes written to promote it systematically substituted shortening for butter and lard in dishes where cooks had never previously wanted it /isco" — hence "2 tablespoons melted Crisco" in a cheese puff and a "Criscoed baking sheet." The dish itself is an old idea in miniature: a cooked flour-and-milk panada, enriched with cheese and lightened with beaten whites, is the same base that produces a cheese soufflé, and dropped in spoonfuls it becomes the small hot savoury that Anglo-American service of the period liked to send in with the salad course. The habit of serving such things in a folded napkin, common in period cookbooks, may well have been practical rather than decorative — anything that rises on egg white alone starts falling the moment it cools.