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Cheese and Bread
1/2 pint (1 cup) grated cheese 1/2 pint (I cup) milk I/2 pint (I cup) bread crumbs I heaping teaspoonful butter 3 eggs Seasoning of salt and red pepper Scald the milk and butter together; remove from the stove, and add the cheese, bread crumbs, and seasonings. Beat up the eggs and add them lightly.
Pour into a buttered fireproof dish and bake for half an hour.
Serve at once.
A cheese pudding of the plainest sort: scalded milk, crumbs, cheese and eggs, baked until just set. The original gives no oven temperature, which is the one thing it most needs.
- Oven heatBake at around 350F. Much hotter and the eggs may curdle before the centre sets, leaving a grainy pudding weeping whey. A water bath is not called for here but will not hurt.
- Half a pint means a cupThe recipe helpfully translates itself. American half-pints are 8 fl oz, so a cup of grated cheese (roughly 3-4 oz), a cup of milk, a cup of crumbs.
- The cheeseThe recipe says only 'grated cheese'; a firm dry cheddar-type cheese is the likely intent. Use a well-aged cheddar or similar; young supermarket cheddar carries more water and will loosen the set.
- Bread crumbsSoft crumbs from stale bread, not the dry sandy commercial kind. Dried crumbs absorb far more liquid and give a stodgy result; if that is all you have, use about two-thirds the volume.
- "Add them lightly"This is the hinge. The milk must be off the heat and cooled to warm before the beaten eggs go in, and they should be folded rather than stirred hard. Hot milk plus vigorous beating gives scrambled egg suspended in cheese.
- Red pepperCayenne, used sparingly for warmth rather than heat. A pinch is enough; paprika is not the same thing. Mustard often accompanies cayenne in cheese dishes of this kind — the Welsh rarebit in this same book uses both.
- Fireproof dishAny 1-quart baking dish, buttered. A period 'fireproof' dish would typically have been earthenware or heavy ovenware, which holds heat and continues cooking after it leaves the oven.
- Timing and yieldHalf an hour is about right for a shallow dish; check that the centre is just set with a faint wobble. It serves two as a supper dish or four as a savoury course, and it will settle as it cools, so 'serve at once' is worth taking literally.
Baked cheese puddings of this kind sit somewhere between Welsh rarebit and a soufflé, and they were a standard of British and American household cookery. In this book the term appears to mean the vessel: a lidded earthenware or fireproof dish that went from oven to table, a form of cooking often recommended in the early twentieth century as economical. The recipe's logic is thrift. Stale bread, a scrap of cheese and three eggs make a hot main dish for a household without meat that night, and the scalded milk poured over crumbs is the same technique that underlies bread pudding, bread sauce and every other way cooks found to keep bread from being wasted.