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Toast, Buttered, and Cheese
Crush half a pound of old Cheshire cheese in a mortar, and pound with it a piece of butter the size of a walnut, the yolk of a hard-boiled egg, and a small tea-spoonful of mustard. Take a slice of bread half an inch thick, cut off the crust, and toast it on both sides. Spread the cheese-paste upon it, lay it upon a dish, and put it in a Dutch oven before a clear fire until the paste is melted. Serve very hot. Time to melt the cheese, about three or four minutes. Probable cost, 1s. Sufficient for two persons.
A potted-cheese paste on toast, browned by radiant heat rather than baked. The technique is simple; the vessels and the cheese are what need translating.
- The Dutch ovenHere this means a tin reflector oven stood open-side toward the fire, not a cast-iron pot. The modern equivalent is an overhead broiler or grill, rack set high, 3 to 4 minutes until the paste is molten and blistered.
- Old CheshireA firm, crumbly, slightly acidic cow's milk cheese, aged so it is dry rather than elastic. Aged Cheshire is still made; a mature Lancashire or a dry, crumbly farmhouse Cheddar behaves the same way in the mortar.
- Butter the size of a walnutConventionally reckoned at about 1 oz, or 2 tablespoons. The hard-boiled yolk and the butter help bind the paste, which might otherwise separate into oil and curd under the broiler.
- MustardMost likely dry English mustard powder rather than a jarred paste; Victorian recipes generally say "made mustard" when they mean the prepared kind. If using prepared mustard, use rather more and expect a slightly looser paste.
- PoundingA mortar works the cheese and butter together without whipping in air or warming the fat the way a food processor can. Grate the cheese first, then work it with the butter and yolk in a bowl with a fork or a stiff spatula.
- Proportions and yieldHalf a pound of cheese makes far more paste than the single slice of toast the recipe describes will carry. Use about 2 oz per slice; the remainder keeps for several days covered in the refrigerator and is good cold on bread.
- The breadA half-inch slice, crusts off, toasted on both sides before the paste goes on. Toasting first is not fussiness — untoasted bread will soak up the melting fat and collapse.
Cassell's places this among the buttered-toast entries rather than with the Welsh rarebits, and the distinction is real: a rarebit is cheese melted with liquid, usually ale or milk, and poured over toast, while this is a cold pounded cheese paste that is merely warmed through on the bread. Pounded or "potted" cheese, worked in a mortar with butter, mustard and sometimes wine, was a standing item in the English larder from the eighteenth century onward — a way of using up hard rinds and dry ends of a truckle, and of keeping cheese usable in a house without refrigeration. Cheshire is one of the oldest named English cheeses, and its character is traditionally attributed to the county's salt-bearing pastures. The listed cost of a shilling for two was given alongside the recipe, as Cassell's did throughout.