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Cheese Puff
One tablespoon of butter, one-half tablespoon of flour, one cup of milk, one cup of grated cheese, one cup of cooked rice, three eggs, salt and pepper. Melt butter in a baking dish, add flour, milk, cheese and rice, salt and pepper, lastly the eggs well beaten; bake twenty minutes. Mix in order given.
— Mrs. A. C. Fancher
A soufflé-adjacent supper dish that leans on rice rather than a thick white sauce for body. The original assumes you know what a moderate oven is and how long a rice pudding takes to set; here are the numbers.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives no oven direction at all, so a temperature has to be supplied. A moderate oven, around 350F, suits it; twenty minutes should be about right for a shallow dish of this volume, with the centre just set and no liquid pooling — check rather than trust the clock.
- The flour is not a mistakeHalf a tablespoon of flour to a cup of milk makes no real sauce. The thickening here comes from the eggs and the starch in the cooked rice, so resist the urge to build a proper béchamel — extra flour turns it pasty rather than puffed.
- Melting butter in the baking dishThe instruction is simply to melt the butter in the dish, which also greased the sides; it could have been done on the range top or in the oven. In a modern kitchen, melt the butter in the dish in the warming oven, or melt it separately, pour it in, and swirl to coat.
- Grated cheese, circa 1900Grated cheese -- The recipe specifies nothing beyond "grated cheese," which in American household books of this kind usually meant firm store cheese, close to what we would call an aged yellow cheddar. Use about 4 oz grated; pre-shredded cheese carries anti-caking starch that dulls the texture.
- Cooked riceLeftover plain boiled white rice, cold, fluffed apart. Warm or freshly steamed rice will clump and give you pockets of paste. About one-third cup raw rice yields the cup called for.
- Whole eggs, well beatenThe whites are not whipped separately, so the "puff" is modest — a light set custard that rises a little and settles as it cools. Serve it straight from the oven.
- SeasoningAged cheddar brings plenty of salt. Season lightly before the eggs go in and taste the mixture; a good grind of black pepper and a scrape of nutmeg suit it.
- YieldFour modest servings as a light lunch or supper dish, two as a main course with a salad.
Cheese puffs, cheese soufflés and cheese fondues (the baked, breadcrumbed American kind, not the Swiss pot) crowd the supper chapters of American community cookbooks from the 1890s through the 1920s — meatless dishes that were cheap, quick, and respectable enough for company. The rice here does the work that stale bread or cracker crumbs do in neighbouring receipts: it stretches a few ounces of cheese into a dish for four and gives the eggs something to hold. Each contribution is signed, so a name such as Mrs. A. C. Fancher functioned as both credit and endorsement — the reader knew whose table the dish had come off. That the eggs are simply beaten whole, rather than separated and folded, suggests an everyday receipt rather than a company soufflé, the more elaborate treatment perhaps being saved for occasions.