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Croûtes au Fromage
Ingredients.
Four ounces of grated Cheese (mixed).
Two tablespoonfuls of Cream.
One ounce of warm Butter.
Salt. Cayenne. Mix these all together, and put one tablespoonful between two croûtes of fried bread,
A savoury of the old dinner-table kind: a cheese paste spread between two small rounds of fried bread. The recipe assumes you know the conventions of the savoury course, so most of what is missing is context rather than technique.
- "Cheese (mixed)"In a book of this date this most likely means hard grating cheeses combined, such as Parmesan with Cheddar, Cheshire or Gruyère, though the recipe names none. 4 oz is about 1 1/4 cups grated.
- CreamThe cream of this period was unstandardised and generally richer than modern single or light cream; a thicker cream will hold the paste together, a thin one will slacken it.
- Warm butterNot melted — softened to the point of being spreadable. Melted butter separates from the cheese and leaves the mixture greasy rather than bound.
- CroûtesThe recipe says only "fried bread": small pieces, fried and drained, crisp and no longer greasy when the filling goes in. Size, thickness and frying fat are left to the cook.
- Season lightlyParmesan and mature Cheddar bring a great deal of salt already. Taste the paste before adding any, and treat the cayenne as a pinch rather than a measure.
- Serving hotThe recipe stops at assembly, but savouries generally went to table warm. Brief gentle heating, just until the cheese softens and the bread re-crisps, is all that is wanted; the recipe itself gives no oven or temperature.
- YieldAt one tablespoonful per pair of croûtes, the quantities given will assemble somewhere around a dozen; the recipe states no yield or number of servings.
The savoury was a peculiarly British course, served after the sweet and before dessert fruit, and cheese on fried bread was one of its staples — anchovy toast, devilled kidneys and mushrooms on croûtes belong to the same family. The point of the course was a small, hot, sharply seasoned mouthful to finish the wine, which is why the cayenne is not optional garnish but the structural idea of the dish. Croûte simply means crust, and by the late nineteenth century French kitchen vocabulary had been absorbed wholesale into the English high-class repertoire, so an English cook writing an English recipe for cheese on fried bread still headed it in French.