Cheese Sauce
1 Cupful Cream or White Sauce No. 2 ¾ Cupful Grated American Cheese 1/2 Teaspoonful Salt ⅛ Teaspoonful Pepper ⅛ Teaspoonful Paprika Add the cheese and seasonings to the white sauce and cook in a double-boiler, stirring occasionally until the cheese is melted. Use with boiled rice, samp, macaroni, spaghetti, or boiled potatoes, or with plain potato croquettes.
A plain mornay-style sauce built on a medium white sauce. The only technique that matters is heat control, and the double boiler in the original is there for exactly that reason.
- Keep it off direct heatCheese proteins tighten and squeeze out fat if the sauce approaches a simmer, leaving a grainy, oily mess. The double boiler is not fussiness; hold the sauce below about 160F and stir only until the cheese disappears.
- The quantitiesRead the cheese as 3/4 cupful grated, and the pepper and paprika as 1/8 teaspoonful each. That gives roughly 3 oz of cheese to 1 cup of sauce, which is a fairly rich ratio.
- "American cheese"In books of this period the term usually means ordinary firm cow's-milk cheddar made domestically rather than the processed slices sold under that name now. A medium or sharp cheddar, grated fine so it melts before the sauce has time to overheat, is the safe reading.
- White Sauce No. 2Numbered white sauces of this period generally run from thin to thick, and a No. 2 is usually the medium one, commonly around 2 tablespoons each of fat and flour to 1 cup of milk; check the book's own No. 2 to be sure. If you use cream instead, as the recipe allows, the sauce will be looser and richer.
- SampCoarsely broken hulled corn, sitting between whole-kernel hominy and grits and usually coarser than grits. Any of the listed starches works; the sauce is thick enough to coat rather than pool.
- YieldAbout 1 1/4 cups, enough to dress macaroni or potatoes for four. It thickens noticeably as it cools and will need a splash of milk to loosen on reheating, again over water rather than direct flame.
Cheese sauce of this kind is simply a white sauce carried one step further, and its appearance in a branded shortening cookbook is telling: the roux that begins it was the main argument for the product. Hydrogenated cottonseed-oil shortenings were promoted in the American South in the early twentieth century, and their recipe pamphlets set out to show that a vegetable fat could do everything butter and lard did, sauces included. The numbered white sauces such as the No. 2 called for here were a fixture of domestic-science teaching of the period, drilled as a graded series so that a cook could produce a thin sauce for soup, a medium one for vegetables, and a thick one for croquettes from a single memorized proportion. The serving suggestions, samp and boiled rice alongside macaroni and spaghetti, place the book squarely in a household where starch was the base of the plate and the sauce did the work of making it interesting.