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Cheese Fondue
1 cup scalded milk 1 cup soft stale bread crumbs 1/4 lb. mild cheese, cut in small pieces 1 tablespoon butter 1/2 teaspoon salt Yolks 3 eggs Whites 3 eggs Mix first five ingredients, add yolks of eggs beaten until lemon-colored. Cut and fold in whites of eggs beaten until stiff. Pour in a buttered baking-dish, and bake twenty minutes in a moderate oven.
Despite the name, this is a baked cheese pudding closer to a soufflé than to a pot of melted Swiss cheese. It comes together quickly and must go straight from bowl to oven.
- Moderate ovenIn books of this period usually taken as somewhere around 350-375F. Twenty minutes at that heat suits a shallow dish; a deeper one may want 25-30 minutes, until the centre is just set and no longer soupy.
- Scalded milkMilk brought to just below the boil, with bubbles at the edge of the pan. Pasteurised milk no longer needs scalding for keeping quality, but the heat is doing real work here: it softens the crumbs and starts the cheese melting.
- Soft stale bread crumbsBread a day or two old, torn or rubbed into crumbs by hand -- not the dry sandy crumbs sold in canisters, which will drink the milk and turn the dish pasty. About two slices of white bread gives a cup.
- Mild cheeseA mild cheddar or a young Monterey Jack. Anything very sharp or very aged will separate into strings and oil; the softness of a mild cheese is what lets it disperse through the custard.
- Cool the base before the yolksThe milk and cheese mixture should be no more than warm to the finger when the beaten yolks go in, or they will scramble in threads.
- Cut and foldThe whites are the only leavening. Beat them stiff but not dry, fold in with a spatula in a few decisive strokes, and get the dish into the oven at once.
- Dish and yieldA buttered 1-quart baking dish is about right. It serves three or four as a light entree, with the understanding that it sinks within minutes of leaving the oven.
In American cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, "fondue" often meant this sort of baked crumb-and-cheese pudding rather than the communal pot of melted cheese and wine that Swiss cookery has since made famous in English. The word simply carries its French sense of something melted, and the dish belongs to a family of egg-lightened cheese preparations -- ramekins, cheese souffles, Welsh rarebits -- that cooking schools of the period taught as inexpensive entrees for luncheon or supper. Stale bread is the giveaway of its household origins: the crumbs stretch a quarter-pound of cheese into a dish for a family and use up bread that would otherwise be wasted, a habit of thrift that runs through nearly every chapter of books like this one.