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Fried Bread with Cheese No.1
6 slices of bread 1 cup milk 2 ounces cheese or 1/2 cup grated cheese 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/2 teaspoon potassium bicarbonate Butter or other fat for frying Scald the milk with the potassium bicarbonate; add the grated cheese, and stir until it dissolves. Dip the bread in this mixture, and fry it in the butter. The potassium bicarbonate helps to keep the cheese in solution. It is desirable, however, to keep the milk hot while the bread is being dipped.
A cheese-dipped fried bread, closer to a savory French toast than to a grilled sandwich. The only unfamiliar item is the potassium bicarbonate, which is doing real chemical work here.
- Why the potassium bicarbonateIt raises the pH of the milk, which helps keep the cheese proteins from tightening into stringy curds when heated. Modern sodium citrate cheese sauces reach a similar end, though citrate works mainly by sequestering calcium rather than by alkalinity. Potassium bicarbonate is still sold as a food-grade additive and winemaking agent; baking soda can be substituted at the same volume, with a slightly more saline note.
- Keep the milk below a simmer"scald" is conventionally taken to mean about 180F, hot but not boiling. Once the cheese is in, hard boiling is likely to break the emulsion, which may be part of why the original asks that the milk be kept hot while the bread is being dipped.
- Choose the cheese for meltingTwo ounces is a modest amount, so use something with flavor and good melt: an aged Cheddar, Gruyere or a dry Jack. Pre-shredded supermarket cheese is coated with anti-caking starch and will thicken the milk rather than dissolve into it.
- The breadBread of the period was generally firmer-crumbed than modern soft sandwich bread. A day-old sturdy white or country loaf cut about 1/2 inch thick absorbs the mixture without collapsing; soft sandwich bread will fall apart in the pan.
- DippingA brief dip, a few seconds a side, is enough. The bread should be moistened through but not saturated, or the center will stay wet while the outside browns.
- FryingMedium heat in butter, two to three minutes a side until deep gold. Butter over high heat will brown and burn before the bread colors; wipe the pan and add fresh butter between batches.
- YieldSix slices, serving three as a light main dish with a salad, or six as a supper side.
Meatless cookbooks of the 1910s were not vegetarian in the modern moral sense so much as economic and patriotic: cheese, eggs, milk, beans and nuts were promoted as "meat substitutes" because they supplied protein at a fraction of the cost, and later, during the First World War, because meat was wanted for the armies and for export. Cheese-and-bread dishes were the workhorses of that literature, since a household could stretch two ounces of cheese across six slices of bread and still call it a protein dish. What makes this version unusual is the chemistry. Domestic science was then a self-consciously scientific movement, taught in colleges and written up with laboratory vocabulary, and an alkaline salt to hold cheese in suspension is exactly the sort of trick its authors delighted in printing.