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Cheese Pancakes
Cut some slices of Gruyere cheese half an inch thick and about the size of the top of a wine-glass; sprinkle with cayenne, dip in batter, and fry for three minutes. Serve at once on a very hot dish. Probable cost, 6d. for six or eight slices.
A savoury from the era when cheese fritters closed a dinner rather than opened it. The whole thing hinges on a seal: the batter must set before the cheese inside slumps out.
- Size of the slices"The size of the top of a wine-glass" means rounds of roughly 1.5 to 2 inches across, cut half an inch thick. Cut them from a block rather than using pre-sliced cheese, which is far too thin to survive frying.
- The batter is not givenCassell's assumes you have a frying batter to hand from elsewhere in the book. A plain one of about 4 oz flour, a pinch of salt, one egg and enough milk or beer to make a coating consistency will do; it must be thick enough to cling in an unbroken film, or the cheese leaks.
- Fat temperatureThe recipe gives no temperature and does not say whether the frying is deep or shallow; if deep-frying, fat at around 350-360F suits. Cooler than that and the batter drinks oil while the cheese liquefies; much hotter and the crust colours before the interior softens. The three minutes of the original is plausible for slices this size.
- Dry the cheese firstPat the rounds dry and chill them before dipping. A damp or room-temperature slice makes the batter slide, and any gap in the coating means molten Gruyere in the fryer.
- CayenneA sprinkle, not a coating — the period's savouries were seasoned assertively but the pepper is there to cut the fat, not to dominate. A little grated nutmeg or dry mustard suits Gruyere equally well.
- Serve at once, and mean itThe instruction to use a very hot dish is the practical heart of the recipe. Fried cheese is good only for a few minutes; after that the interior firms and the crust goes soft.
- YieldSix to eight slices serve three or four people as a savoury course or a small first course. Allow two or three each if serving with a sharply dressed salad.
- The cost noteSixpence is the Victorian price for the dish and is of no use as a shopping guide; costings appear throughout Cassell's so a housekeeper could compare dishes against a weekly budget.
Fried cheese in batter belongs to the British savoury, the small hot, salty dish served after the sweet and before the dessert fruit in a late-Victorian dinner — the same slot occupied by anchovies on toast, devilled biscuits and Welsh rarebit. Gruyere is specified because it was one of the imported hard cheeses widely available in British shops by the 1880s and, more to the point, because it browns and stretches without separating into oil and curd the way a crumbly English cheese does. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery was an alphabetical household reference rather than a narrative cookbook, which is why the entry gives no batter recipe: the reader was expected to look up the batter entry separately and combine the two. The costings that close nearly every entry were a selling point of the Cassell's kitchen books, aimed at the middle-class housekeeper.