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Corn and Cheese
1 tablespoon butter 1 tablespoon chopped green pepper 1/4 cup flour 2 cups milk 1 cup chopped corn 1 cup grated cheese 1/2 teaspoon salt Pepper Melt the butter, and cook the peppers thoroughly in it. Make a sauce out of the flour, milk and cheese; add the corn and seasoning. Turn into a buttered baking dish, and bake in a moderate oven thirty minutes.
A plain white-sauce gratin from the wartime meat-substitute tradition. The method is compressed to the point of being incomplete, so a couple of steps need filling in.
- Moderate ovenConventionally somewhere around 350-375F. Thirty minutes is enough to set the custardy sauce and brown the top lightly; the sauce and peppers are cooked before it goes in, though fresh corn is not.
- Building the sauceThe butter and pepper are the start of the roux, though the text does not say so. Stir the flour into the buttered peppers, cook a minute, then add the milk gradually and thicken before the cheese goes in off the heat, so it melts without breaking.
- "Chopped corn"Fresh kernels cut from the cob and roughly chopped, which releases starch and milk. One cup is about two medium ears. Drained canned or thawed frozen corn works; pulse it briefly rather than pureeing.
- Grated cheeseA firm American or Cheddar-type cheese is meant. One cup grated is roughly 3 to 4 oz. Aged cheese gives more flavour but is likelier to go oily; a young Cheddar or Colby holds together better.
- Green pepper"Cook thoroughly" is the one instruction worth obeying. Raw bell pepper in a mild cheese sauce tastes grassy and stays crunchy through the baking, so give it five to seven minutes over low heat until it softens.
- SeasoningHalf a teaspoon of salt for two cups of milk is modest once cheese is added, but taste the sauce before it goes in the dish. A little dry mustard or cayenne is period-appropriate and sharpens a flat cheese.
- Dish and yieldA 1 1/2-quart baking dish suits it. Serves four as a main course with bread and a salad, six as a side. It thickens as it stands, so let it rest five minutes before serving.
Books titled after meatless cookery multiplied in the United States around the First World War, when the Food Administration urged households to observe meatless days and to look to milk, cheese, eggs and legumes for protein. A recipe of this kind fits that pattern: a cheese sauce doing the structural work of a meat course, built on the corn-and-dairy pairing that had long been ordinary American farm eating. Dishes of corn baked in milk with cheese appear under names like corn pudding and scalloped corn across nineteenth-century collections.