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Cheese Pudding
2 cupfuls (1/2 lb.) grated cheese 1 teaspoonful flour 1/2 pint (I cup) hot milk I heaping teaspoonful butter 2 eggs 2 tablespoonfuls bread crumbs Salt and pepper to taste Put the cheese into a bowl, add the flour, salt and pepper, bread crumbs, milk, butter, the yolks of the eggs and the whites well beaten.
Mix gently, pour into a buttered earthenware dish, and bake for a quarter of an hour in a moderate oven. Serve hot.
A soufflé-adjacent cheese pudding of the simplest kind: no roux, no separate sauce, just cheese loosened with hot milk and lifted by beaten whites. Two details decide whether it comes out light or greasy.
- The hinge: fold, don't stir"Mix gently" is doing real work. Beat the whites to soft peaks and fold them in last, in two additions, stopping while streaks are still faintly visible. Beaten in properly, the pudding puffs; stirred through, it sets dense and weeping.
- A moderate ovenConventionally taken today as around 350F. At fifteen minutes a shallow dish will be just set and browning; a deeper one may want longer. It is done when the centre no longer wobbles as a liquid, and it will sink somewhat on the way to the table, which is normal.
- MeasuresHalf a pint is one cup, as the recipe says; the American pint of 16 fl oz is meant, not the imperial. Two cups grated cheese at half a pound means loosely packed coarse gratings, roughly 225 g.
- The cheeseA cook of this period meant a firm, dry, sharpish cheese — what we would call an aged Cheddar. Avoid pre-shredded bags (the anti-caking starch makes it grainy) and avoid anything high-moisture like young mozzarella, which will pool oil.
- Hot milk, not boilingThe milk is heated to help the cheese soften and the crumbs swell. Let the mixture cool to warm before the yolks go in, or they will scramble in threads.
- SeasoningSalt lightly — half a pound of aged cheese brings plenty. A grate of nutmeg or a spoonful of mustard powder is period-appropriate and sharpens the flavour.
- YieldServes three as a light supper dish with bread and a salad, or four as a savoury course. Best taken straight from oven to table; like a soufflé it does not reheat well.
Cheese puddings of this pattern — cheese, crumbs, milk, eggs, baked in the dish they are served from — sit between English cheese pudding and French souffle au fromage, and they turn up in Edwardian household cookery as a way of making a small quantity of cheese feed several people at a meatless meal. Fireproof earthenware for oven-to-table cooking was promoted in Anglo-American kitchens in the early years of the twentieth century as cleaner and more economical than metal, since the food cooked and travelled to the table in one vessel — though nothing in this recipe beyond the phrase "earthenware dish" ties it to that fashion. The economy of the dish speaks for itself: half a pound of cheese, two eggs and a spoonful of crumbs, and supper is on the table in a quarter of an hour.