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Some Kitchen Kinks: Omelet
Cheese Omelet No. I.
Cheese may be introduced into omelets in several ways. An ordinary omelet may be served with thin cheese sauce made in the following proportions: 1½ tablespoonsful of flour. 1/2 tablespoonsful of cheese. cupful of milk.
This sauce may also be added to omelets in which boiled rice, minced meat, or some other nutritious material has been included. Cheese Omelet No. II.
Grated cheese may be sprinkled over an ordinary omelet before it is served.
Cheese Omelet.
Yolks of 2 eggs. 2 tablespoonsful of hot water. 1 cupful of grated cheese.
Salt and pepper.
Whites of 4 eggs. 1 tablespoonful of butter.
Beat the yolks until lemon colored and add the hot water and the seasoning. Beat the whites until they are stiff, and add the cheese. Cut and fold the two mixtures together.
Heat the butter in omelet pan and cook the mixture very slowly until it is brown on the underside. If possible, cook the top of the omelet in the oven or by means of a hot plate held over it.
Breakfast Cereals with Cheese.
That cheese combined with cereal foods makes a rational dish as regards the proportion of nutrients it supplies has been pointed out on another page. Cheese and some of the crisp "ready to serve" cereal breakfast foods is a combination which is common, the cheese being melted with the cereal food, or simply served with it.
There are many who relish a piece of cheese with the cooked cereal so commonly eaten for breakfast and find such a combination satisfying to appetite and taste. Oatmeal or some other home cooked breakfast cereal prepared with cheese is palatable, and such dishes have an advantage in that they may be served without cream and sugar. Since such a dish contains considerably more protein than the breakfast cereals as ordinarily served, it has a further advantage in that it may well serve as the principal item of a breakfast menu, instead of a preliminary to other courses. Such a combination as cereals cooked with cheese, toast, fruit, and tea, coffee, or chocolate, makes a palatable as well as nutritious breakfast and one which does not require much work to prepare and to clear away. A recipe for preparing oatmeal with cheese follows. Wheat breakfast foods, either parched or unparched, corn meal, and hominy may be prepared in the same way.
Oatmeal with Cheese. 2 cupsful of oatmeal. 1 cupful of grated cheese. 1 tablespoonful of butter. 1 level teaspoonful of salt.
Cook the oatmeal as usual. Shortly before serving, stir in the butter and add the cheese, and stir until the cheese is melted and thoroughly blended with the cereal.
The cheese should be mild in flavor and soft in texture. The proportion of cheese used may be increased if a more pronounced cheese flavor is desired.
Cheese with Mush.
Cheese may be added to cornmeal mush or to mush made from any of the corn or wheat preparations now on the market. The addition of cheese to cornmeal mush is particularly desirable when the mush is to be fried.
Fried Bread with Cheese No. I. 6 slices of bread. 1 cupful of milk. 2 ounces of cheese, or 1½ cupful of grated cheese. ½ teaspoonful of salt. ½ teaspoonful of potassium bicarbonate.
Butter or other fat for frying.
Scald the milk with the potassium bicarbonate; add the grated cheese, and stir until it dissolves. Dip the bread in this mixture and fry it in the butter. The potassium bicarbonate helps to keep the cheese in solution. It is desirable, however, to keep the milk hot while the bread is being dipped.
Fried Bread with Cheese No. II.
Cut stale bread into thin pieces.
Put two pieces together with grated cheese between them; dip into a mixture of egg and milk and fry in butter or other fat.
Roman Gnocchi. 2 cupsful of milk. 1/4 cupful of flour. 1/4 cupful of cornstarch. 2 cupsful of milk. 2 egg yolks. 3/4 cupful of grated cheese.
Salt.
Melt the butter; cook the cornstarch thoroughly, and then the flour in the butter; add the milk gradually; cook three minutes, stirring constantly; add the yolks and one-half cupful of the cheese. Pour into a buttered shallow pan and cool. Cut into squares; place them on a platter a little distance apart; sprinkle with remaining cheese, and brown in the oven.
The proteid value is that of threefourths of a pound of average beef, the fuel value that of 14 pounds.
Calculated cost 17 cents.
Cheese Souffle. 2 tablespoonsful of butter. 3 tablespoonsful of flour. 1/2 cupful of milk (scalded). ½ teaspoonful of salt.
A speck of cayenne. 1/4 cupful of grated cheese. 3 eggs.
Melt the butter; add the flour and, when well mixed, add gradually the scalded milk. Then add salt, cayenne, and cheese. Remove from the fire and add the yolks of the eggs, beaten until lemon colored. Cool the mixture and fold into it the APPENDIX whites of the eggs, beaten until stiff.
Pour into a buttered baking dish and cook 20 minutes in a slow oven.
Serve at once. a The proteid value of this recipe is equal to that of a half pound of beef; the fuel value is equal to that of three-fourths of a pound.
Cheese Soufflé with Pastry. 2 eggs. 2/3 cupful of thin cream. 1 cupful of grated cheese. ½ cupful of Swiss cheese cut into small pieces.
Salt, cayenne pepper, and nutmeg.
Add the eggs to the cream and beat slightly, then add the cheese and seasoning. Bake 15 minutes in a hot oven, in patty tins lined with puff paste.
Cheese Croquettes. 3 tablespoonsful of butter. 1/4 cupful of flour. 2/3 cupful of milk.
Yolks of 2 eggs. 1 cupful of cheese cut in very small pieces. 1/2 cupful grated cheese.
Salt and pepper.
Make with a white sauce, using the butter, flour, and the milk. Add the unbeaten yolks and stir until well mixed, then add the grated cheese.
As soon as the cheese melts, remove from the fire, fold in the pieces of cheese, and add the seasoning.
Spread in a shallow pan and cool.
Cut into squares or strips, cover with an egg and crumb mixture, and fry in deep fat.
Fried Cheese Balls. 11/2 cupsful of grated cheese. 1 tablespoonful of flour.
The whites of 3 eggs.
Salt, pepper, cracker dust.
Beat the whites of the eggs; add the other ingredients; make into balls and roll in cracker dust. If the amount of flour is doubled, the mixture may be dropped from a spoon and fried without being rolled in crumbs.
CHEESE SOUPS AND VEGETABLES COOKED WITH CHEESE In these dishes the cheese is used not only to add nutritive value, but also to give its characteristic flavor either to materials otherwise rather mild in taste (as in potatoes with cheese) or to combine its flavor with that of some more highly flavored vegetables (as in cheese and vegetable soup). The ingenious housekeeper whose family is fond of cheese can doubtless think of many desirable ways of making such combinations besides those given in the following recipes:
Milk and Cheese Soup. 3 cupsful of milk, or part milk and part stock. 11/2 tablespoonsful of flour. 1 cupful of grated cheese.
Salt and paprika.
Thicken the milk with the flour, cooking thoroughly. This is best done in a double boiler, with frequent stirrings. When ready to serve, add the cheese and the seasoning.
The proteids in this soup are equal in amount to those in five-sixths of a pound of beef of average composition; its fuel value is higher than that of a pound of beef.
Cheese and Vegetable Soup. 2 cupsful of stock. 2 tablespoonsful of finely chopped carrots. 1 tablespoonful of chopped onion.
A very little mace. 2 tablespoonsful of butter.. 2 tablespoonsful of flour. 11/2 teaspoonsful of salt. 1 cupful of scalded milk. ¼ cupful of grated cheese.
Cook the vegetables a short time in one-half of the butter, add the stock and the mace, boiling 15 or 20 minutes. Strain and add the milk.
Thicken with flour cooked in the remaining butter. Just before serving, stir in the cheese and cook until it is melted.
This is a run of cheese cookery lifted into an appendix, and the typesetting has suffered: several fractions are garbled and one ingredient list is missing a line. Read the proportions against the method before you start.
- The broken fractions"1½ teaspoonful of salt" and "1½ tablespoonsful" almost certainly began life as ½ and 1½ respectively, and "1½ cupful of Swiss cheese" in the pastry souffle is likely ½ cupful. In Cheese Omelet No. I the sauce calls for "1/2 tablespoonsful of cheese," which cannot be right for a cheese sauce; a scant ½ cupful grated to 1 cupful milk gives a thin sauce of the kind described.
- Roman Gnocchi ingredient listMilk is listed twice at 2 cupsful and butter is not listed at all, though the method begins "melt the butter." Treat it as 2 cupsful milk total; the butter quantity has to be supplied by guess, and 3 to 4 tablespoonsful will carry ¼ cupful flour plus ¼ cupful cornstarch.
- Oven temperaturesA "slow oven" for the cheese souffle is 300-325F; twenty minutes at that heat suits a souffle baked in one dish only if it is shallow, so watch for a set centre rather than trusting the clock. The "hot oven" for the pastry souffle in patty tins is 425-450F, which is also what puff paste needs.
- Potassium bicarbonateIt is a permitted food additive, sold for winemaking, and it raises the pH of the milk so the melted cheese does not break into strings and grease. A pinch is enough; more than that tastes soapy. A modern cook gets the same result with a slice of processed cheese or a little sodium citrate.
- What "cheese" meantUnqualified "cheese" in an American book of this sort would usually be mild factory Cheddar, sold young and moist. The oatmeal recipe explicitly asks for cheese "mild in flavor and soft in texture." A cupful grated is roughly 3 to 4 ounces, which is what the recipe's own "2 ounces of cheese, or 1/2 cupful of grated cheese" implies.
- The omelet's hingeFour whites to two yolks makes this a foam omelet, not a French one. Cook it very slowly in a wide pan so the base browns before the foam collapses, and finish the top under a broiler rather than fussing with a heated plate. Serve the moment it leaves the heat.
- Oatmeal with cheeseWhether the 2 cupsful means dry oatmeal or cooked porridge is not stated; "cook the oatmeal as usual" with salt listed as an ingredient suggests the raw measure, but the cheese proportion suits the cooked, so judge by taste. Add the cheese off the heat or on the lowest possible flame; boiled cheese in cereal turns grainy.
- Cheese croquettes and ballsBoth mixtures must be thoroughly chilled and firm before they are breaded, or they burst in the fat. Fry at 365-375F. The cheese balls, being mostly egg white and cheese, want to be small; a rounded teaspoonful each.
- YieldsThe book gives none. At a guess: the omelet serves two, the souffle two to three, the soups two to three, and the gnocchi or croquettes four as a light main dish.
The tone of these pages gives away their origin: the constant comparisons of "proteid value" and "fuel value" to pounds of average beef, and the "calculated cost 17 cents," read like American home-economics and government bulletin writing of the years around 1910, when cheese was being promoted as a cheap protein to replace meat. The material sits in an appendix, and the argument in the middle of this section, that cheese with breakfast cereal supplies enough protein for the dish to stand as the main item of a meal rather than a preliminary course, is a nutritionist's argument rather than a cook's. The rationale for potassium bicarbonate in Fried Bread with Cheese belongs to the same moment, when the tendency of heated cheese to curdle and weep was being explained to housekeepers in chemical terms. Roman Gnocchi, the one dish here with a foreign name, is the semolina-style baked gnocchi alla romana in a cornstarch-and-flour version.