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Baked Crackers and Cheese No.2
9 or 10 butter crackers or soda crackers 2 cups hot milk, whole or skimmed 1 cup grated cheese 1/4 teaspoon salt This is more quickly prepared than the preceding recipe, but as the milk is likely to curdle, it has not so good a consistency.
Soak the crackers in the milk; place them in a buttered baking dish in alternate layers with the cheese; pour over them the remaining milk, and bake. This dish may be covered with buttered crumbs. Variety may be secured, in either this recipe or the preceding one, by putting a very small amount of mixed mustard on each cracker.
A wartime supper dish of soaked crackers, milk and cheese, given here in its faster but less reliable form. The recipe assumes you know its own oven and timing, so both need supplying.
- The hinge: keep the heat lowThe author admits the milk is likely to curdle. Heat is the main culprit, so bake gently, around 325F, and pull the dish while the custard is still just set and trembling. A pan of hot water under it helps if your oven runs fierce.
- Oven and timeNo temperature is given. 325-350F for 30 to 35 minutes, until the top is browned and the milk no longer sloshes when the dish is tipped.
- Butter crackersPlain, slightly rich, unsweetened crackers. The recipe itself allows soda crackers, so saltines are fine; reduce the added salt if you use them, since they are already salted on top.
- Grated cheeseAt the time this would most likely have meant a dry, firm store cheese of the American cheddar family. A sharp cheddar is right; avoid pre-shredded bags, whose anti-caking starch makes the sauce grainy.
- Hot milkHeat the milk to just steaming, not boiling, before pouring it over the crackers. Very hot milk and cheese together make the curdling the author warns of more likely.
- Buttered crumbsRoughly a cup of fresh breadcrumbs tossed with two tablespoons of melted butter. Add them in the last ten minutes so they brown without burning.
- The mustardThe recipe says a very small amount on each cracker, so a dab rather than a spoonful. It is there to cut the flatness of milk and mild cheese.
- YieldNo yield is given; the quantities suggest three or four servings. It is unlikely to reheat well, as the crackers soften to paste.
Meatless Cookery belongs to the First World War kitchen, when the U.S. Food Administration pressed households to observe meatless days and shift protein onto milk, cheese, eggs and legumes. That context explains why something as humble as crackers baked in milk sits among meat substitutes: cheese was a relatively cheap concentrated protein, and the cracker supplied bulk that would otherwise have come from wheat bread, itself conserved by voluntary pledge rather than formal ration. The dish is a cousin of the older English cheese pudding and of the American scalloped-cracker dishes in which broken crackers stood in for breadcrumbs. Its most striking feature is the author's candour: the quicker version is printed with the plain warning that it produces a worse texture, and the choice is left to the cook.