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Cheese au Gratin
1/4 lb. grated cheese 3 slices bread 4 eggs, 3 cups milk 2 tablespoons butter 1/4 teaspoon salt Few grains cayenne Butter a deep pudding dish; trim off the crust and butter well the slices of bread, place in the dish, butter side down. Add the cheese and seasonings on top, beat the eggs, add the milk, pour over the bread and let it stand an hour. Bake twenty to thirty minutes in a moderate oven.
A savoury bread-and-cheese custard, the direct ancestor of what American cooks now call a strata. Two things decide whether it succeeds: the soak and the oven.
- Moderate ovenAround 350F (period 'moderate' is generally read as 350-375F). If the dish is deep and narrow, 325F with a longer bake gives a smoother custard and less chance of the edges curdling before the centre sets.
- The timing is optimisticThree cups of milk and four eggs in a deep dish will rarely set in twenty to thirty minutes. Expect 45 to 55 minutes at 350F, and judge by the custard: puffed at the edges, barely trembling at the centre, about 170-175F on a thermometer. Pulling it early leaves a milky layer under the bread.
- Do not skip the hourThe standing time is the hinge. The bread has to drink the custard through before it bakes, or you get soaked top slices sitting on liquid. An hour at room temperature is the minimum; overnight in the refrigerator is better, and you then add ten minutes to the bake.
- Quarter pound of cheeseGrated, that is roughly a cup, perhaps a little more if loosely packed. The recipe does not say which cheese; a firm cheddar-type that grates dry and melts cleanly is the safest reading. Very young or very wet cheeses will weep fat into the custard.
- Three slices of breadProbably cut from a hand-sliced loaf, so likely thicker than a modern sandwich slice hree ththick-cut, or four or five standard slices, is a reasonable equivalent. Slightly stale bread absorbs better than fresh.
- Butter side downAn old trick worth keeping. The buttered face against the dish keeps the bottom from gluing itself down and gives a faint fried edge under the custard.
- Cayenne, not paprikaA few grains means a pinch. Cayenne with cheese is a period habit, and it sharpens the dairy rather than making the dish hot. Mustard powder does similar work if you have no cayenne.
- YieldFour servings as a light supper or luncheon entree, two if it is the whole meal. Best eaten within twenty minutes of leaving the oven, while it still stands tall.
The Gold Medal Flour Cook Book was published by Washburn-Crosby, the Minneapolis milling firm that later became General Mills, and, as branded flour books of the period often did, it ranged well beyond baking into full menus for the middle-class household. Au gratin in French means simply cooked with a browned crust — from gratter, to scrape, referring to the crusty bits left in the dish — and by 1900 American cookbooks had stretched the term to mean almost anything baked with cheese. What is really being described here is the bread-and-butter pudding of English cookery, turned savoury: an economical way to use up dry bread and a small amount of cheese, stretched with the milk and eggs that a household with a milkman and a hen run could count on. Something like the same construction appears in mid-century American books under the name strata, where the overnight soak that this recipe compresses into an hour becomes the whole point.