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Canadian Cheese Pudding
4 ounces grated cheese 3 ounces bread crumbs 1 ounce butter 1 small teaspoon mixed mustard 1/2 pint milk Pepper and salt Boil the milk, and pour it over the bread crumbs and let them stand on the stove-covered up--for a quarter of an hour. Now mix in the grated cheese, mustard, seasoning and butter. Butter a baking dish, and put in the mixture, and bake for a quarter of an hour to twenty minutes in a hot oven. Serve immediately.
A bread-and-cheese savoury with no eggs in it, so expect a soft, spoonable dish rather than a set custard. Everything depends on the crumbs swelling properly before the cheese goes in.
- The hinge: soak the crumbs fullyThe quarter hour of covered standing (the recipe leaves the dish on the stove) is what turns milk and crumbs into a smooth paste. Rush it and the pudding is liable to bake into distinct wet bread and separated cheese fat.
- "Mixed mustard"This means made-up mustard paste — mustard powder stirred with water or vinegar — not dry powder. Any prepared English or Dijon mustard stands in; a small teaspoon is about 1 teaspoon.
- Half a pint is ambiguousIn a British or Canadian book of this period the imperial half pint is 10 fl oz; an American half pint is 8. Start at 8 fl oz (1 cup) and add more only if the crumbs stay dry, since extra milk makes the pudding sloppy.
- Weights to volumes4 oz grated cheese is roughly 1 packed cup, 3 oz fresh breadcrumbs about 1 1/2 cups (dry crumbs would be closer to 3/4 cup and will drink more milk), and 1 oz butter is 2 tablespoons.
- The cheeseA firm aged cheddar of the Canadian type is the likeliest reading of the title. Grate it yourself — pre-shredded cheese is coated with starch or cellulose and will not melt as cleanly.
- "Hot oven"Roughly 400-450F. Fifteen to twenty minutes at that heat sets the edges and browns the top; longer and the cheese begins to weep oil.
- Add cheese off the heatStir the cheese into the crumb mixture once it has stopped steaming hard. Cheese stirred into near-boiling milk turns stringy and greasy before it ever reaches the oven.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no yield; the quantities suggest two as a light main course or four alongside something else. It is meant to go to the table straight from the oven, as the direction to "serve immediately" indicates.
Cheese puddings of this kind — crumbs, milk, grated cheese, mustard — were the workhorse of the British and Canadian meatless dinner, close cousins to Welsh rabbit and to the baked cheese "savoury" served at the end of a formal meal. The Canadian label points to cheddar: by the late nineteenth century Ontario and Quebec factory cheddar was a major export, shipped in large coloured wheels to Britain, and "Canadian cheese" became a shorthand for a hard, sharp, reliably meltable cheese rather than a regional style of cooking. Its usefulness as a meatless dish reflects the practical arithmetic of the era — cheese supplied protein at a fraction of the cost of a joint, and crumbs stretched it further.