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Deviled Crackers
Mix together 3 tablespoonfuls of grated cheese, 1/4 of a teaspoonful of dry mustard, 1 teaspoonful of anchovy paste, a dash of cayenne and 1 saltspoonful of salt. Blend this with I heaping tablespoonful of butter, spread over the crackers and put in a hot oven until they begin to color.
BREADS, BISCUITS, WAFFLES, GRID- DLE CAKES, ETC.
A savoury spread of the kind served with soup or at the end of a meal in place of a sweet. It takes five minutes and the only real risk is walking away from the oven.
- SaltspoonfulA saltspoon is roughly a quarter teaspoon. With the anchovy paste and cheese both bringing salt, taste the mixture before you add it at all.
- Hot ovenConventionally somewhere around 400-450F. The crackers only need to blister and take colour at the edges, which is likely to be only a few minutes on the upper rack. They go from pale to burnt very quickly, so watch them rather than the clock.
- The cheese'Grated cheese' unqualified most likely points to a firm, dry cheese suitable for grating, such as an aged Cheddar. A young supermarket Cheddar will weep oil; Parmesan works if you cut the added salt.
- Anchovy pasteStill sold in tubes, and the tinned Italian fillets mashed to a paste do the same job. If you use fillets, one large one is about a teaspoon of paste.
- The crackersPlain soda crackers or water biscuits, not a seasoned or buttery cracker. The topping is aggressive enough that the base should be neutral.
- Getting it spreadableHave the butter properly soft and mash everything with a fork into a smooth paste before it goes near a cracker; cold butter will tear the biscuit. Spread thinly - a thick layer slides off as it melts.
- YieldThe quantities given cover about a dozen to sixteen 2-inch crackers, enough for four people alongside soup. Serve them warm; they lose their point once cold.
- Stray textThe section heading for the following chapter has run into the end of the recipe in the original printing. It is not an instruction.
"Devilled" in Victorian and Edwardian cookery means seasoned hot and salty - mustard, cayenne, and some form of anchovy or bottled sauce - and it was applied to almost anything from kidneys to biscuits. Cheese and anchovy on toast or a cracker belongs to the same family as Scotch woodcock and the anchovy-laced cheese savouries served as the last course of a formal English dinner, a course that survived in Britain long after Americans had settled on dessert as the finish. Part of its appeal is arithmetic: three tablespoons of grated cheese and a spoonful of anchovy paste stretch across a plateful of cheap crackers and read as a course. Anchovy paste in a tube, cheap and shelf-stable, did the flavouring work that a modern cook might get from Worcestershire sauce or Parmesan.