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Some Kitchen Kinks: Scalloped
Scalloped Potatoes with Cheese No. I.
Put into a buttered baking dish alternate layers of cheese sauce No.
I and cold boiled potatoes, sliced or cut into dice. Cover with buttered crumbs and bake.
Scalloped Potatoes with Cheese No. II.
Put into a buttered baking dish alternate layers of white sauce and cold boiled potatoes, either sliced or cut into dice. Put over the top a layer of grated cheese and then a layer of buttered bread crumbs.
Brown in the oven.
Scalloped Cabbage or Cauliflower with Cheese.
Cauliflower or cabbage may be scalloped according to either of the recipes given for scalloped potatoes and cheese. Sometimes a cauliflower is boiled whole, spread with grated cheese, then with buttered bread crumbs. It is browned in the oven and served with white sauce poured around it.
Cheese with Potato Puffs. 1 cupful of mashed potatoes. 1/4 cupful of milk. 1 egg. ½ teaspoonful of salt. ½ cupful of grated cheese.
Beat the potatoes and milk together until thoroughly mixed. Add the egg and the salt and beat thoroughly. Finally add the cheese. Bake in muffin tins in a slow oven 10 or 15 minutes.
A similar dish may be made by scooping out the inside of a baked potato and mixing it with cheese as above. Fill the potato-skin shell with the mixture, return to the oven, and bake until light brown.
Potatoes with Cheese Sauce.
Cut boiled potatoes into cubes and serve with cheese sauce No. I. This is one of the cheese and vegetable dishes most frequently found on restaurant menus.
CHEESE SALADS, SANDWICHES, AND SIMILAR CHEESE DISHES Cheese of one sort or another is a very common accompaniment of salads, and the combination is rational as well as palatable, for the constituents of the succulent foods-chiefly water and cellulose-supplement the protein and fat of the cheese. Cheese is often used also as a part of the salad.
A number of recipes are given below for cheese salads and other cheese dishes which may be served with dinner or other regular meals, or served as part of a special lunch or special supper. Many of the cheese dishes discussed in other sections are also commonly used for such occasions when something savory is desired which can be easily and quickly prepared.
Cheese with Salads.
Cheese or cheese dishes are an acceptable addition to salads. Neufchâtel or other cream cheese, either plain or mixed with pimientos and olives may be passed with lettuce or may be cut into slices and served on lettuce.
Cheese balls are often served with salad. They are made of some soft cream cheese, and are frequently combined with chopped chives, olives, sweet peppers, chopped nuts, etc., for the sake of adding flavor.
Cooked egg yolk, spinach extract, etc., are sometimes mixed in for the sake of color. If the balls are rolled in chopped chives or parsley, both flavor and color are supplied.
A cluster of scalloped and cheese-with-vegetable dishes from a period when cheese was treated as a protein food rather than a garnish. Most of it translates directly; the measurements in the potato puffs need a second look.
- The suspect measurementsThe measurements in the potato puffs are odd: "1½ cupful of grated cheese" against a single cupful of mashed potato gives more cheese than potato, and may well be a printer's corruption of ½ -- with the larger figure the result is closer to a cheese custard than a potato puff. The salt, 1½ teaspoonfuls to a cupful of potato, is on the salty side; taste and adjust.
- Slow ovenRoughly 300°F, though period sources put a slow oven anywhere between about 250 and 325°F. At that heat the puffs will set in 10 to 15 minutes but will not colour; if you want the browned top the second variation calls for, finish them at 400°F or under the broiler for a minute.
- The scalloped dishes need no stated temperatureThe scalloped dishes give no oven heat -- everything in them is already cooked, and 375°F for 20 to 30 minutes is enough to heat through and brown the crumbs.
- Cheese sauce No. IA cross-reference to another entry in the same book, not reproduced on this page. Any bechamel with roughly a cup of grated cheese stirred in per two cups of sauce will do; add the cheese away from the burner so it does not break.
- Buttered crumbsThis means dry bread crumbs tossed with melted butter, roughly a tablespoon of butter to a quarter cup of crumbs, not crumbs scattered over a dish and dotted with butter. The coating browns evenly only if the fat is worked through first.
- The whole cauliflowerCauliflower boiled whole until tender enough to serve will be waterlogged by the time it is also browned. Boil or steam it just short of done, drain it very well, then coat and brown at 425°F so the crumbs colour before the head collapses.
- Neufchatel then and nowAmerican Neufchatel in this period was a fresh, soft, unripened cheese sold as a cream cheese; the modern supermarket product of that name is a lower-fat cream cheese and behaves the same way in the cheese balls described here. It is not the French Neufchatel, which is bloomy-rinded.
- Spinach extractThe green colouring for cheese balls was made by pounding spinach, squeezing out the juice and heating it so the colour coagulated. A little finely chopped parsley or blanched spinach does the same job with less trouble.
- YieldThe puff mixture is small, roughly enough to fill a half-dozen muffin cups. Each scalloped dish should be scaled to your baking dish rather than to a count of potatoes.
The scallop, in American cookery of this period, meant any dish of cooked food layered with sauce and crumbs and browned, and it was one of the most useful things in a household kitchen because it existed to use up what was already boiled and cold. The framing here is characteristic of the era's domestic-science movement: the book pauses to explain that cheese with salad greens is "rational as well as palatable" because the protein and fat of the cheese balance the water and cellulose of the vegetable. That vocabulary comes from the nutritional chemistry that entered American household manuals in the 1880s and 1890s, when cheese was promoted energetically as a cheap meat substitute and cooks were being taught to think in terms of food constituents rather than dishes. The remark that potatoes in cheese sauce were among the dishes "most frequently found on restaurant menus" is a small piece of evidence about what was actually being eaten out at the time, and worth more than most of the theory around it.