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Escalloped Cheese
Butter a baking dish, put in a layer of bread cut into inch squares, add a layer of cheese cut small, dust with salt and paprika. Add more bread, about one-half a stale loaf, and one cup of cheese, and one-half teaspoon of salt. Beat two eggs light, add one pint of milk and pour over the bread and cheese. Bake for one-half hour in a moderate oven.
A savory bread pudding under an older name, and it works exactly as a modern strata does. The quantities are given twice over — once as "a layer," once as a total — so read the whole paragraph before you start layering.
- Oven temperatureA "moderate oven" in books of this kind is usually taken as about 350-375F. Half an hour at that heat will set a shallow dish; a deep one may need 40-45 minutes, until the center is puffed and no longer liquid.
- Quantities, plainlyHalf a stale loaf cut in one-inch cubes is roughly 5–6 cups of bread. One cup of cheese means one cup cut small, not grated and packed — about 4 oz. A pint of milk is 2 cups, and two eggs to two cups of milk is a lean custard, which is what keeps this from being heavy.
- Which cheese"Cheese" unqualified in an American book of this kind would most often have been a firm factory Cheddar. Anything that melts cleanly will do; avoid fresh mozzarella or a very young cheese, which weep water into the custard.
- Stale bread mattersFresh bread collapses into paste. If your loaf is soft, cube it and dry it in a low oven for ten minutes first so it drinks the custard instead of dissolving in it.
- Let it soakThe recipe pours and bakes immediately. Twenty to thirty minutes of standing before it goes in the oven gives a noticeably more even, less curdled result, and the dish can be assembled and refrigerated overnight.
- PaprikaIn books of this kind paprika generally meant a sweet paprika, used as much for color as for flavor. Use sweet, not smoked or hot, if you want the original effect.
- YieldBakes in a 1½–2 quart dish and serves four as a light supper or lunch dish, six as a side.
Escalloped — a word generally traced to the scallop shell, dishes having originally been baked in or shaped like one, with the later culinary sense of baking in layers with crumbs or bread — was one of the most useful words in a nineteenth-century American kitchen, applied to oysters, potatoes, tomatoes and, as here, cheese. Recipes of this kind belong to the tradition of stale-bread cookery that runs from Welsh rabbit through cheese pudding to the modern strata: no household threw out a half loaf.