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Scalloped Cheese
1½ pint (I cup) grated cheese 3 eggs 1/2 pints (3 cups) milk I 1/4 teaspoonful mustard Salt and red pepper to taste 4 slices bread 1 tablespoonful butter Remove the crusts from the bread after it has been spread with the butter. Place the bread in a fireproof dish, then sprinkle in the cheese. Beat up the eggs, add the milk and seasonings; pour them over the bread and cheese.
Allow to remain for half an hour.
Bake in a hot oven for twenty minutes.
A bread-and-cheese custard, the ancestor of what most people now call a savoury bread pudding or strata. The measurements have suffered in transcription, so read them before you start.
- The garbled quantities"1/2 pints (3 cups) milk" is 1 1/2 pints, which is 3 cups in the reckoning this book uses, since its own first line equates 1/2 pint with 1 cup. "I 1/4 teaspoonful mustard" is ambiguous: the same setting prints "I" for "1" elsewhere, so it is either 1/4 or 1 1/4 teaspoonfuls of dry mustard. A quarter-teaspoon is the safer starting point.
- Cheese, by weightA cup of grated cheese is roughly 3 to 4 oz of a firm English cheese. The recipe specifies nothing beyond "grated cheese"; a dry, sharp Cheddar or Cheshire suits it, while young supermarket cheddar gives a milder, oilier result.
- "Fireproof dish"Any oven-safe baking dish of about 1 1/2 quarts. The term simply indicates ware that could be sent to the oven, typically earthenware or the newer heat-resistant glass.
- Hot oven, but watch the custard"Hot" is nowhere defined in the book, and in manuals of this kind it can mean anything from about 400F upwards. Three cups of milk and three eggs are unlikely to set in twenty minutes at that heat without curdling at the edges; bake at 350-375F and judge by the centre, which should be just barely wobbling, usually 35 to 45 minutes.
- Do not skip the half hourThe soak is the hinge. Dry crumb has to drink the custard or the bread floats and bakes into a crust over a layer of scrambled egg. Longer than thirty minutes does no harm.
- Red pepperCayenne, used sparingly; an eighth of a teaspoon is enough. Cayenne and mustard were common seasonings for cheese dishes in British cookery of this kind.
- BreadThe recipe says only four slices, buttered and crusted. Close-crumbed white bread, slightly stale, cut about half an inch thick, works best; the cheese goes over it, so the cheese is what browns.
- YieldServes three or four as a light supper dish.
Scalloped cheese belongs to a family of British cheese-and-bread dishes that runs from Welsh rabbit through cheese pudding to the ramekins and fondues of late-Victorian menus, all of them ways of turning a small amount of hard cheese and some stale bread into a hot dish. The mustard and cayenne are not decoration: cheese was widely held to be indigestible, and the standard remedy in nineteenth-century household manuals was to season it sharply, an idea generally traced to the same reasoning that put mustard beside cold beef. Its appearance in a book devoted to casserole dishes is of a piece with that thrift: a dish that could be assembled early, left to soak, baked, and carried to the table in the same pot.