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Milk and Cheese Soup
3 cups of milk--or part milk and part stock 1 cup grated cheese Salt and paprika 1 1/2 tablespoons flour Thicken the milk with the flour, cooking thoroughly. This is best done in a double boiler, with frequent stirrings. When ready to serve, add the cheese and the seasoning.
The proteids in this soup are equal in amount to those in five-sixths of a pound of beef of average composition; its fuel value is higher than that of a pound of beef.
A thin cheese veloute made with milk rather than a roux-based stock, and typical of the wartime books that argued cheese could stand in for beef. Two details decide whether it succeeds: how the flour goes in, and how the cheese comes out.
- Add the cheese off the heatCheese stirred into simmering milk breaks and turns stringy, leaving oil on the surface. Pull the pan from the heat once the milk is thickened, then stir the grated cheese in until it melts from residual warmth.
- The flour needs a slurryDry flour tipped into warm milk will lump. Whisk the 1 1/2 tablespoons into a few tablespoons of the cold milk first, then stir that into the rest before heating.
- "Cooking thoroughly"This points to cooking out the raw starch taste, not merely thickening. In a double boiler allow something like 15 to 20 minutes with frequent stirring. With only 1 1/2 tablespoons of flour to 3 cups of milk the soup will stay thin -- lighter than a cream soup -- and the recipe gives no sign that this is a fault.
- The double boilerThe usual period precaution against scorching milk, on ranges that offered little control at low heat. A heavy saucepan over low heat with steady whisking will do the same job in less time.
- What cheeseUnqualified "grated cheese" in American books of this period usually meant plain firm store cheese of the cheddar type. A medium to well-aged cheddar is a reasonable match; very young mild cheddar tends to give a flatter, greasier result.
- ProteidsAn older word for proteins. The closing comparison with beef is a nutritional argument rather than a cooking instruction.
- YieldThree cups of liquid gives four small first-course servings, or two as a main dish with bread. Salt cautiously at the end, since the cheese carries most of it.
"Meatless" cookbooks of this kind are usually associated with the First World War food conservation campaigns, when American households were urged to save meat and wheat for shipment abroad and cheese was promoted as a cheap household substitute for beef -- though nothing on this page fixes its date. The closing sentence, with its accounting of proteids and fuel value against a pound of beef, is home-economics argument: the domestic science movement drew on the calorimeter and food-composition work of nutritional chemists such as W. O. Atwater, whose tables let a cookbook writer put a number on a bowl of soup. The dish itself is unremarkable -- milk thickened with flour and finished with cheese, a formula found across English and American cookery well before this -- but the justification attached to it is the mark of its moment.