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Baked Crackers and Cheese No.1
9 or 10 butter crackers or Boston crackers 1/4 pound of cheese or 1 cup grated cheese 1 1/2 cups milk 1/4 teaspoon salt Flour Split the crackers if the thick sort are selected, or with a sharp knife cut them into pieces of uniform size. Pour the milk over them, and drain it off at once. With the milk, flour, cheese and salt make a sauce. Into a buttered baking dish, put alternate layers of the soaked crackers and sauce. Cover with bread crumbs and brown in the oven, or simply reheat without covering with crumbs.
The above is a very satisfactory substitute for macaroni and cheese, and can be prepared in less time.
A cheese-sauce gratin built on crackers instead of pasta, from the era when a thick common cracker was a pantry staple. Two things need attention: the vanished cracker and the unmeasured flour.
- Butter and Boston crackersPlain, dry commercial crackers of the sort sold from barrels, the Boston cracker being the thicker and sturdy enough to split, which is why the recipe says to split "the thick sort." New England common crackers are the nearest thing still made; failing that, use plain water crackers or a double layer of unsalted saltines, which soften faster and want a lighter hand with the milk.
- The flour is unmeasuredThe original simply lists "Flour," and lists no butter for the sauce either. For 1 1/2 cups milk a white sauce would usually run to about 2 tablespoons flour (cooked in a like amount of butter), or 3 if you want the sauce to hold its layers rather than soak straight into the crackers.
- Pour the milk over and drain at onceThis is the hinge. The crackers are meant to be dampened, not soaked, so they keep some structure under the sauce, and the drained milk then goes into the sauce. Leave them sitting in the milk and the dish turns to paste.
- CheeseAn unqualified "cheese" in an American book of this period would most often be a firm factory cheddar. Grate it and stir it into the finished sauce off the heat so it melts without stringing or breaking.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given because the dish is already cooked and only needs colour. Bake at 400F for 15 to 20 minutes, until the crumbs are brown and the sauce bubbles at the edges.
- SaltA quarter teaspoon assumes salted crackers and salted cheese. Taste the sauce before assembling rather than adding it blind.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; roughly enough for three or four as a supper dish in a shallow one-quart baking dish. It is unlikely to reheat as well as macaroni and cheese; the crackers go soft.
Cracker-and-cheese bakes belong to the long American habit of using hard crackers as a starch when nothing else was to hand: the same thick common cracker went into chowder, into stuffing, into cracker pudding, and here into a gratin. The book's claim that this is "a very satisfactory substitute for macaroni and cheese, and can be prepared in less time" puts the emphasis squarely on speed. Meatless cookery of the early twentieth century was driven as much by economy, Lenten and Adventist practice, and wartime meat conservation as by any modern notion of vegetarianism, and cheese was the standard protein stand-in.