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Cheese Scallops
2 ounces of cheese 4 whites of eggs 1 dessertspoon milk or cream 4 rounds hot buttered toast Cayenne and salt Line four patty tins with thinly sliced cheese, break a white in the center of each, and season with cayenne and salt; add the cream or milk, cover with grated cheese, and bake from ten to fifteen minutes. Serve very hot on the buttered toast.
A savoury built from leftover egg whites, of the sort that turns up in books where the yolks have gone into custard or mayonnaise. It is essentially four small cheese-and-white gratins turned out onto toast.
- Patty tinsThese are shallow individual tart or bun tins, roughly 2 1/2 to 3 inches across. A standard muffin tin works, though the deeper cups make turning out onto the toast harder; butter them well regardless, since melted cheese welds to metal.
- DessertspoonTwo teaspoons, or about 10 ml. The whole quantity of milk or cream is divided among four tins, so it is a moistening rather than a liquid component.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. A moderate oven, 350-375F, suits this: hot enough to melt and lightly brown the top cheese, gentle enough that the whites do not blow up and toughen.
- Watch the whites, not the clockEgg whites with no yolk to soften them turn rubbery quickly, so check toward the lower end of the recipe's ten to fifteen minutes and pull the tins once the whites are opaque and just set and the grated cheese has coloured.
- The cheeseTwo ounces total is little enough that flavour matters. Use a firm, dry, well-flavoured cheese -- aged Cheddar, Cheshire, Gruyere -- and slice the lining thinly enough that it melts rather than sitting as a rind. Fresh mozzarella or anything high in moisture will weep and flood the tin.
- SaltSeason lightly. The lining cheese, the grated topping and the buttered toast all bring salt of their own.
- Assembly and servingHave the toast made and buttered while the tins bake, and loosen each scallop with a small palette knife the moment it comes out; the cheese stiffens as it cools and will tear. Serves four as a savoury course or two as a light lunch.
"Scallop" here is not the shellfish on the plate but the cooking sense derived from it -- food baked and served in a scallop shell or a similar small shallow mould, the usage that also gives us scalloped potatoes. Cheese savouries of this kind were a fixture of late Victorian and Edwardian dining, served at the end of dinner after the sweet, and they offered a way of using up egg whites left over from custards, curds and mayonnaise. Some period cookbooks do group recipes by which half of the egg needed disposing of. Meatless cookery of the period leaned on cheese and eggs for the same reason vegetarian cooking often still does -- they were accessible sources of savour and protein when the joint was off the table, whether for reasons of Lent, principle or thrift.