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Cheese Sandwiches
1½ lbs. grated cream cheese I large egg 1/2 pint (I cup) milk 1 tablespoonful cornstarch 3 canned red peppers ½ teaspoonful lemon juice Salt and red pepper to taste Buttered slices of bread Cook all the ingredients over the fire in a casserole for five minutes. Spread on the bread and toast them. Serve hot.
A cooked cheese spread in the Welsh rarebit family, thickened with cornstarch and egg and finished under heat on buttered bread. The whole thing hinges on gentle heat: this is a custard as much as a cheese sauce.
- Keep it below a simmerFive minutes "over the fire" means five minutes of steady stirring over low heat, not a boil. Cheese plus whole egg will break into grainy curds and weeping fat if the mixture reaches a simmer; take it off as soon as it coats the spoon thickly.
- "Grated cream cheese"Not modern block cream cheese, which does not grate. Period American usage of "cream cheese" was loose and could cover firmer fresh cheeses; a mild young cheddar or a domestic Monterey Jack behaves the way this instruction expects.
- About the quantitiesThe printed page gives 1½ lbs. of grated cream cheese, which is what our text now reads, against 1 cup of milk. The stray "I" characters through the ingredient list are the numeral 1 in the original type.
- Canned red peppersMost likely pimientos, sold in small jars today. Three whole canned peppers is roughly 1/3 to 1/2 cup drained and chopped, depending on their size; drain them well or the spread will be watery.
- Red pepper means cayenne"Salt and red pepper to taste" calls for a pinch of ground cayenne, not crushed chili flakes and not more of the pimiento.
- Cornstarch needs slurryingWhisk the tablespoon of cornstarch into the cold milk with the egg before any heat goes near it, then add the cheese. Adding dry starch to warm liquid gives lumps you cannot stir out.
- "Toast them"Spread the warm mixture on buttered bread and put it under a broiler 4-5 inches from the element for 2-3 minutes, until bubbling and speckled brown.
- YieldEnough for about 8 slices of sandwich bread, or 16 halves as a savory. Any leftover spread firms up in the refrigerator and can be softened over low heat.
This is a cousin of Welsh rarebit, the cooked cheese-on-toast dish that filled the "chafing dish" and "luncheon" chapters of American cookbooks in an era when cheese was still treated as a supper savory rather than a course of its own. The canned red peppers are the tell of the period. Pimientos are often said to have begun arriving in American groceries in tins around the turn of the twentieth century, and their pairing with grated cheese in this era is sometimes offered as the ancestor of Southern pimiento cheese, though the origin story is contested, and that spread is bound with mayonnaise rather than cooked with egg and starch.