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Cheese Toast
Allow as many thin slices of stale bread as will be used at the meal. For 6 slices allow 1/2 cupful of grated stale cheese. In a saucepan melt and mix together I large tablespoonful of butter, 2 tablespoonfuls of flour, 1/4 teaspoonful of salt and a dash of pepper. Stir in gradually 1 pint of hot milk, making a smooth sauce. Keep hot at the side of the fire. Toast the bread IIO nicely. Stir the cheese into the sauce and as soon as it is melted pour over the buttered toast.
Cover a moment that it may soak and soften then serve.
A plain white sauce enriched with cheese, poured over toast — the frugal ancestor of cheese on toast with a spoon. The whole thing depends on the sauce, which should be thick enough to cling but loose enough to soak in.
- Take it off the heat for the cheeseStir the grated cheese into the sauce away from direct heat, as the original implies by keeping the pan "at the side of the fire." Cheese boiled in a flour sauce turns grainy and weeps fat.
- Proportions1 tablespoon butter and 2 tablespoons flour to 1 pint (2 cups) milk makes a thin sauce. Equal parts butter and flour (2 tablespoons each) gives a better-balanced roux, but if you want it to sit on the toast rather than run off it is the flour that has to increase.
- "Grated stale cheese"This means dry, firm cheese — an aged Cheddar or similar. Half a cupful grated is about 2 oz, which is modest by current taste; 4 oz will not unbalance the sauce.
- Stale breadDay-old bread toasts drier and holds the sauce without collapsing. Fresh sandwich bread will go to paste under a pint of hot sauce.
- Buttered toastThe toast is buttered before the sauce goes on, which is not incidental — the fat slows the soaking so the bread softens rather than dissolves.
- CoveringA plate or lid over the dish for a minute steams the toast through. Longer than that and the surface loses its bite altogether.
- YieldThe quantities are pitched at six slices, but the recipe explicitly scales to however many slices the meal requires and states no number of servings. It does not hold; make it at the moment of serving.
Cheese poured over toast belongs to the same family as Welsh rabbit, but where a rabbit binds the cheese with ale or beer and little or no flour, this version builds a white sauce first and folds cheese into it. The effect is economical: a pint of milk thickened with flour stretches half a cupful of cheese across six slices of stale bread.