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Cheese Puff
Make a smooth batter by stirring 1 cupful of milk into an equal measure of sifted flour; season with salt and pepper and the least dash of sugar; stir into this 1/3 of a cupful of strong, well flavored grated cheese, beat thoroughly and pour into a buttered baking dish. It will puff to three times its height in baking and must be eaten at once.
A three-ingredient batter pudding from the cheese chapter, written in the shorthand of a period cook who expected the reader to know the rest. Two things it never states are the oven and the eggs.
- MeasuresA cupful is 8 fl oz; the batter is equal parts milk and sifted flour by volume, roughly 1 cup milk to 4 oz flour. The third of a cup of grated cheese is about 1 oz of hard cheese, which is modest — sharp cheddar, aged gouda or dry jack all suit the "strong, well flavored" specification.
- Rising powerAs printed the batter has no eggs, no baking powder and no beaten whites, so the only lift available is steam. Popover and puff batters of the same period are usually built on eggs, commonly two, beaten into the milk before the flour goes in; without them the mixture is unlikely to rise threefold and will bake much denser.
- OvenThe recipe gives no heat. Steam-risen batters of this type are generally baked hot, around 425F, to set the outside before the inside collapses; a moderate oven is likely to give a flatter, heavier result.
- The dish mattersButter the baking dish generously. Batters of this type are often poured into a dish heated first in the oven, on the reasoning that the batter climbs the hot sides rather than spreading.
- MixingStir the milk into the flour rather than the reverse, as directed. The recipe says to beat thoroughly; a thin pour batter needs only to be beaten smooth.
- Do not open the doorAny batter that rises on steam alone falls when the oven is opened partway through. Leave it undisturbed until the top is set and browned.
- Yield and timingOne cup of milk makes two small servings. "Must be eaten at once" is literal — the structure is steam, and it deflates within a few minutes of leaving the oven.
Cheese dishes carried a lot of weight in low-cost cookery: an ounce of strong cheese flavours a whole dish of milk and flour, which is exactly the arithmetic this recipe is doing. The family it belongs to is generally traced through Yorkshire pudding and popovers to other batters or foams that rise in a hot oven and must reach the table before they sink. The insistence on cheese that is strong and well flavoured, rather than a named variety, is characteristic of household books of the period, which assumed the cook was using up whatever hard rind-end was in the larder rather than buying cheese for the purpose. Recipes written for economy leaned on this trick constantly — a small amount of an expensive, assertive ingredient stretched across a cheap bulk of flour and milk.