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Open Cheese and Bacon Sandwich
Beat 3 eggs until light, add 3/4 pound soft cheese grated or put through food chopper 1 1/2 teaspoons table sauce 3/4 teaspoon salt 1/2 teaspoon paprika Few grains cayenne. Mix well and spread on 8 slices bread cut one-third inch thick. Cut 3/4 pound bacon in very thin slices the length of the slice of bread. Make bacon still thinner by pressing each strip on a board with a broad knife. Cover cheese with bacon and bake 8 or 10 minutes under gas flame, or in hot oven.
An open-faced broiled sandwich of the 1920s-30s luncheon type, sturdy enough to serve four to eight people. The whole thing hinges on the bacon being pounded thin enough to crisp in the same few minutes the cheese custard needs to set.
- "Bake under gas flame"This means the broiler of a gas range, with the food beneath the flame. Use your broiler with the rack a few inches from the element. If you use the oven instead, a "hot oven" in books of this period is usually taken as somewhere in the 400-450F range.
- Soft cheeseNot a fresh or bloomy-rind cheese: it has to be grated or pushed through a food chopper. The likeliest reading is a young, mild, moist cheddar or the block "store cheese" of the period. A mild yellow cheddar, or a half-and-half mix of cheddar and American, works.
- Table sauceA bottled brown condiment sauce of the Worcestershire or A1 family, kept on the table rather than in the kitchen. Worcestershire is the safest substitute at the quantity given.
- Bacon thicknessStandard sliced bacon may not render and crisp reliably in 8-10 minutes over a soft cheese layer. Pressing each strip flat with the broad side of a knife is not decorative; it thins the slice so it cooks through before the cheese scorches. Buy the thinnest bacon you can find and flatten it anyway.
- BreadOne-third inch is about the thickness of a standard supermarket sandwich slice, or a shade thinner. Use a firm white or country loaf; soft bread will collapse under the wet cheese mixture. Toasting one side lightly first helps.
- Watch it, do not time itThree eggs to three-quarters of a pound of grated cheese makes a thick spreadable paste, but egg-bound cheese still overcooks quickly under a broiler. Pull the tray when the bacon has browned and the cheese has puffed and firmed at the edges.
- Yield and servingEight open sandwiches, from the eight slices of bread. Cut each on the diagonal and serve immediately; they toughen as they cool.
- SaltThree-quarters of a teaspoon plus a heavily salted cheese plus bacon adds up. Taste the cheese mixture before spreading and cut the added salt if your cheddar is sharp or your bacon heavily cured.
Open sandwiches broiled with cheese belong to the hostess literature of the early twentieth century, when the informal luncheon and the Sunday-night supper displaced heavier sit-down meals for middle-class households without full-time kitchen staff. The appeal was that the whole tray went under the flame at once and came out at the same moment, which is exactly what an informal supper needs. The technique is a cousin of Welsh rabbit, generally traced to eighteenth-century Britain, but here the cheese is bound with egg into a spreadable paste rather than melted in a pan, and topped with bacon in the American manner.