Cheese Soup
4 tablespoonfuls grated cheese 3 quarts clear soup stock 1 1/2 cupfuls flour 4 tablespoonfuls Crisco 2 cupfuls cream 2 eggs Salt, pepper, and paprika to taste Finely grated cheese Put flour into double boiler, add gradually cream, Crisco, 4 tablespoonfuls of grated cheese and paprika to taste, stir over fire till a smooth paste. Break in eggs, mix well, cook two minutes longer and allow to cool. Roll into balls, when they are all formed, drop into boiling water and cook gently five minutes. Drain and put into soup tureen. Pour over boiling stock and serve with dish of finely grated cheese.
This is a clear broth garnished with poached cheese dumplings — the "soup" itself is nothing more than good stock, so everything depends on the stock and on getting the paste stiff enough to hold a ball.
- The hinge: chill the paste hardThe dough is a panada — flour cooked with cream and enriched with egg — and it will slump into the water if worked while still warm. Spread it on a plate, refrigerate at least an hour until firm, then roll walnut-sized balls with floured hands and poach a test one before committing the batch.
- CriscoThe book was written to sell it. Crisco is still made, but any solid shortening or an equal weight of butter (about 2 oz / 55 g for 4 tablespoons) works; butter gives more flavour and a slightly softer ball.
- Double boilerEssential here, not optional. A cream-and-flour paste this thick scorches instantly over direct heat, and 1 1/2 cups flour to 2 cups cream is very stiff — expect to work it with a wooden spoon rather than a whisk.
- The cheese"Grated cheese" unqualified, in an American book of this period, is likely to mean a dry, hard grating cheese — Parmesan or an aged store cheese. Use Parmesan or a well-aged Cheddar; fresh mozzarella-style or soft cheeses will weep fat into the paste.
- SeasoningSalt and pepper are in the ingredient list but never mentioned in the method. Season the paste itself — about a teaspoon of salt — since the dumplings taste flat if you rely on the stock alone.
- Poaching"Boiling water" should be brought back to a bare simmer once the balls go in; a rolling boil tears them. Five minutes is right for walnut-sized dumplings, a little longer if you roll them larger.
- Assembly and timingPoach the dumplings just before serving and keep the stock at a full boil to pour over them, as the recipe directs; held in hot broth they will go on softening.
- YieldThree quarts of stock serves ten to twelve as a first course. The paste makes roughly three dozen small dumplings — halve everything for a family dinner.
A Calendar of Dinners belongs to a genre that flourished after 1911, when Procter & Gamble launched Crisco: the branded cookbook, in which every recipe calling for fat calls for one particular fat. Marion Harris Neil, an experienced cookery writer, supplied the recipes, and the company supplied the reason for the book's existence — which is why shortening turns up here in a cheese dumpling, a place where a European cook would have reached for butter without thinking. The dish itself is older than the book and not really American: poached balls of egg-and-flour paste served in clear broth are a standing feature of German and Austrian cooking (the family of Klösschen and Nockerl). Its appearance in the soup chapter reflects the period's confidence that a formal dinner opened with clear stock, and that the interest lay in whatever was floating in it.