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Cheese Pudding
Put a breakfast-cupful of milk into a sauce-pan, with a piece of butter the size of a large egg. Let it remain until the butter is melted, then pour it over three-quarters of a pound of bread-crumbs, and half a pound of grated cheese; let these soak for twenty minutes, then add a pinch of salt and four eggs well beaten. Pour the mixture into a well-buttered dish, and bake in a quick oven. This is a good way to finish up a rather dry crust of cheese. Time to bake, three-quarters of an hour. Probable cost, exclusive of the cheese, 9d. Sufficient for six persons.
A late-Victorian thrift bake: stale crumbs, the hard end of a cheese, and eggs to bind. Two things need translating before you start — the cup and the oven.
- Breakfast-cupfulA breakfast cup is larger than a teacup, roughly 8–10 fl oz (240–300 ml). Take it as a generous cup.
- Butter the size of a large eggAbout 2 oz / 55 g, or 4 tablespoons.
- The crumb-to-liquid ratioThree-quarters of a pound (340 g) of crumbs against one cup of milk gives a very stiff, almost dough-like mass — the eggs supply the rest of the moisture. If your crumbs are dry rather than freshly grated from a soft stale loaf, expect to need noticeably more milk to get a mixture that will pour, as the recipe assumes.
- A quick ovenRoughly 400–425F (200–220C), though Victorian oven descriptions are only approximate. Forty-five minutes at that heat will scorch an egg-set pudding of this size; the practical reading is a hot start to raise it, then the lower end of the range, and judge by a set centre and a browned top rather than the clock.
- The cheeseHalf a pound (225 g) grated. The recipe names no variety, but a dry, hard cheese — an aged Cheddar, Cheshire or Lancashire — suits 'a rather dry crust of cheese'; the point of the dish is to use up cheese too hard to slice. Grate it fine so it melts through the crumbs.
- SaltA pinch is right, and no more. Aged cheese and salted butter between them carry most of the seasoning; mustard powder or cayenne appears in some period cheese dishes if you want lift.
- The soakTwenty minutes is not padding. The crumbs must fully absorb the hot milk before the eggs go in, or the pudding bakes coarse and weeps.
- ServingSix as a supper dish, and it wants something sharp alongside — pickle, a dressed salad, or stewed tomato. It falls as it cools, so bring it straight from the oven.
Cheese pudding belongs to the large Victorian family of dishes built on stale bread and leftover cheese — the same thinking that produced Welsh rarebit, cheese ramekins and bread-and-butter pudding. The frank note that "this is a good way to finish up a rather dry crust of cheese," followed by a costing in pence, is characteristic of the book: recipes were meant to be judged on economy as much as flavour. Cheese sold by the wedge cut from a large wheel dried hard at the exposed edge in an unrefrigerated larder, so a usable method for the crust was worth printing. The reliance on breadcrumbs rather than flour also reflects a kitchen where a loaf went stale within days and nothing was thrown out.