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Cheese Fondue
Sift sufficient stale bread crumbs to make 1 cupful. Grate 1/4 of a pound of dry cheese.
Soak the crumbs in 1 pint of fresh milk. Add 3 eggs whipped very light, 1 scant tablespoonful of butter melted, a pinch of baking-soda dissolved in a few drops of warm water, salt and pepper to taste and the grated cheese. Pour this into a buttered baking dish, sprinkle thickly with dry crumbs and bake in a quick oven until golden brown. Serve at once as it soon falls.
This is not Swiss fondue but a baked cheese pudding, closer to a loose soufflé, and the last line of the recipe is the one that matters: it deflates within minutes of leaving the oven, so have the table ready before it goes in.
- Quantities in modern termsA pint is 2 cups of milk; a quarter pound of dry cheese grates to roughly 1 to 1 1/4 cups, loosely packed. A dish of about 1 1/2 quarts suits the volume, and it should serve about four as a light supper, two as a main.
- "Quick oven"Period sources put a quick oven somewhere around 400-425F, though the ranges vary from book to book. At the top of that range the edges will set and brown before the centre is done; about 400F on a middle rack for 30-35 minutes should give the same golden crumb top with a set middle. It is done when the centre is puffed and barely trembles.
- "Dry cheese"This means a hard, aged cheese that grates to a powder rather than a paste "
- The eggsWhipping the whites and yolks together "very light" gives some lift, but separating them and folding the stiffly beaten whites in last produces a noticeably higher pudding. Either way, fold gently and bake immediately.
- Cheese and heatAged cheese in a milk-and-egg base can turn grainy if pushed too hard. Keeping the oven towards the lower end of "quick," and taking it out as soon as the top is browned, keeps the texture smooth.
- CrumbsStale bread crumbs, sifted, means fine dry crumbs, not the soft fresh kind. Commercial dried crumbs work for the topping; for the body, dry out day-old bread and grind it, since packaged crumbs are often seasoned.
- ServingStraight from the oven to the table. Once it falls it is still perfectly good eating, but flat and dense rather than airy.
"Fondue" in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century English cookbooks rarely meant the communal pot of melted cheese and wine now associated with Switzerland; it borrowed the French fondue, from fondre, "to melt," for any dish in which cheese was melted into a soft mass, and was often applied to a baked crumb-and-egg pudding of this sort. It earns its place because it is a way of turning stale bread and a small piece of hard cheese — four ounces stretched across four servings — into something that arrives at the table looking like a soufflé. Recipes of this type appear throughout Anglo-American household manuals of the period under a shifting set of names: cheese fondue, cheese pudding and cheese soufflé, with the distinctions between them rarely consistent from one book to the next.