Fondee
2 ounces butter. 4 ounces bread crumbs. 8 ounces cheese. 1 cup sweet milk. 3 eggs.
Cut the butter and cheese into small pieces and place them in a large bowl with the bread; on this pour scalding milk, after which add the yolks well beaten, also a little salt. Mix well together, cover and place on the back of the range, stirring occasionally, till all is dissolved; when add the whites beaten to a stiff froth. Place in a buttered pie-plate and bake in a quick oven for twenty minutes. Serve as soon as taken from the stove. Mustard is considered by some an improvement.--Mrs. H.H.S.
This is a baked cheese pudding in the soufflé family, and it behaves like one: it rises, then it falls. Everything below is aimed at getting it to the table while it is still tall.
- Ounces are weight, not volume8 oz cheese is roughly 2 packed cups grated; 4 oz dry crumbs is about 1 1/4 cups, or nearer 2 cups if you use soft fresh crumbs. Weigh if you can, since the ratio of crumb to cheese decides whether it sets or slumps.
- A quick ovenRoughly 400-425F. Twenty minutes at that heat should give a browned, puffed top over a centre that is only just set.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh unsoured milk, distinguished from the buttermilk and clabbered milk that also turn up in recipes of the period. Whole milk, scalded to just below a simmer.
- The back of the rangeThe coolest part of a wood or coal stove. On a modern hob this means the lowest setting, or a bowl over barely steaming water. The mixture holds beaten yolks and must not go much above 160F or you will have scrambled egg with cheese in it.
- Cool before the whites go inThe recipe does not say it, but let the cheese mixture drop to warm rather than hot before folding in the whites, or they deflate on contact. Fold in three additions with a light hand and stop while streaks are still faintly visible.
- Choice of cheeseA firm aged cheddar is the likeliest match for what a Virginia household would have had. Very young or very fatty cheeses break and weep at this heat. Cheddar, or cheddar with a little Gruyere, behaves best.
- The pie-plateA buttered 9-inch pie dish or shallow gratin, not a deep soufflé mould. The shallow shape is why twenty minutes is enough.
- MustardHalf a teaspoon of dry English mustard stirred in with the salt. It sharpens the cheese rather than tasting of mustard.
- Yield and timingServes three as a light main dish, four as a savoury course. "Serve as soon as taken from the stove" is not a flourish: it will sink noticeably within five minutes, so have the table sitting before it comes out.
The spelling here, fondee, is one of several Anglicised forms of the French fondue found in nineteenth-century American cookbooks alongside "fondu." It does not mean the communal pot of melted cheese and wine that the word now conjures; in English-language cookery of this period a fondue was usually a baked dish of cheese, milk, crumbs or breadcrumbs and eggs, closer to a souffl ing it set with egg. Cheese dishes of this kind suited a book like Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879) because they turned a small quantity of an expensive ingredient and some stale bread into a hot dish substantial enough to anchor a supper or fill out a course. The attribution to "Mrs. H.H.S." is characteristic of the book, which Marion Cabell Tyree assembled from contributions by some 250 Virginia housekeepers, most of them credited only by initials.