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Boiled Fondue
1 1/2 cups bread crumbs 1 1/2 cups milk 2 tablespoons butter 6 ounces crackers 1 1/2 cups cheese cut into small pieces Soak the bread in the milk. Melt the butter, and add the cheese. When the cheese has melted, add the soaked crumbs and the seasoning. Cook a short time, and serve on toasted crackers.
A soft cheese-and-bread mixture spooned over crackers, closer to a rarebit than to Swiss fondue. The recipe assumes soft fresh crumbs and gives no seasoning list, so a few decisions are left to the cook.
- Keep the heat lowThis is the hinge. Cheese melted in butter over anything above a bare simmer will break into stringy curds and a pool of grease. Melt it gently, stirring, and pull the pan off the heat before it comes anywhere near a boil.
- The crumbs are soft, not dry"Bread crumbs" here means fresh crumb torn or grated from a day-old loaf, which is why they can be soaked in milk. Dry packaged crumbs will absorb the milk into paste; use about 3 slices of bread, crusts off, torn small.
- The missing seasoningThe instructions call for "the seasoning" though none is listed, a common lapse in books of this era. Salt, pepper, and a little dry mustard or paprika are the period-appropriate choices; a teaspoon of Worcestershire is also in keeping.
- Cheese quantity1 1/2 cups cut in small pieces is somewhere around 6 to 8 ounces of a firm cheese, depending how coarsely it is cut. A sharp aged cheddar or a dry Cheshire melts best here; young supermarket cheddar and pre-shredded cheese with anti-caking starch both tend to turn grainy.
- Six ounces of crackersThat is a generous quantity, about a sleeve and a half of soda crackers. They are the base, not a garnish; the recipe says only 'toasted crackers', so toast them dry however you like -- a few minutes in a moderate oven keeps them from going limp under the sauce.
- "Cook a short time"Two or three minutes after the crumbs go in is enough, only long enough for the mixture to thicken and the crumbs to lose their raw texture. Longer cooking dries it out and tightens the cheese.
- YieldProbably about four servings as a light supper dish, though the recipe states no yield. It sets firm as it cools, so serve it straight from the pan; reheat over low heat with a splash of milk if it stiffens.
"Fondue" in Anglo-American cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries rarely meant the communal Swiss pot of wine and Gruyère. It meant any soft, melted cheese preparation, usually bound with bread or crumbs and often baked or, as here, cooked on the stovetop — a first cousin to Welsh rarebit and to the baked cheese puddings that fill the same chapters. Its place in a book of Meat Substitutes reflects the nutritional thinking of the period, when cheese, eggs, and legumes were catalogued as sources of "proteid" that could stand in for a meat course, an argument that gained real force in the United States during the wheat- and meat-saving campaigns of the First World War. The pairing with crackers rather than bread may simply be thrift: soda crackers were cheap, shelf-stable, and a standard pantry item.