Cheese Sandwiches
INGREDIENTS. Slices of brown bread-and-butter, thin slices of cheese.
Cut from a nice fat Cheshire, or any good rich cheese, some slices about½ inch thick, and place them between some slices of brown bread-and-butter, like sandwiches.
Place them on a plate in the oven, and, when the bread is toasted, serve on a napkin very hot and very quickly. TIME.-10 minutes in a brisk oven.
SEASONABLE at any time.
A toasted cheese sandwich baked rather than fried, from an era when the oven did the work of a sandwich press. It needs almost no translation, but a few details are worth pinning down.
- "Brisk oven"Roughly 425-450F (220-230C). At that heat the buttered bread crisps in about 10 minutes while the cheese softens without running out of the edges.
- Cheshire cheeseA firm, crumbly, slightly salty cow's-milk cheese still made in England and sold in better cheese shops. If it is not to hand, a mature Lancashire, a young Cheddar or a Caerphilly gives the same dry crumble and clean tang; avoid anything rubbery or pre-sliced, which weeps oil.
- "Fat" cheeseIn Victorian usage this most likely means rich in butterfat rather than greasy. A lean or skim-milk cheese tends to toughen on heating rather than soften.
- Half-inch slicesThicker than cheese is usually cut for a sandwich today, though the ingredients list confusingly calls for "thin slices of cheese". A thinner slice may melt away into the bread before the crust colours.
- Brown bread-and-butterProbably a wholemeal or wheatmeal loaf. The recipe does not state how thickly the bread is cut or which face is buttered; the butter does help the crumb brown in the oven, so a dry slice is not a good substitute.
- Baking surfaceA plate in a hot oven is slow and awkward; a baking sheet, or a rack set over one, gives a better base. Turning the sandwiches once halfway through browns both faces evenly.
- ServingThe direction to serve "very hot and very quickly" matters: toasted cheese left to stand soon goes leathery. A folded napkin was the conventional way to send hot toasted dishes to table, and would help hold the heat.
- YieldThe original gives no quantity. Reckon one sandwich per person as a savoury course or supper dish, two as a light meal.
The toasted cheese sandwich sits at the end of a long English line running back through Welsh rabbit and simple "toasted cheese", a dish that appears in English cookery writing well before Beeton and was long treated as both a tavern supper and a savoury at the close of dinner. What distinguishes this version is the use of the oven, which allowed several sandwiches to be baked at once rather than held before a fire on a toasting fork or in a cheese-toaster. Cheshire, named for the county, was among the most widely sold English cheeses of the nineteenth century and was shipped in quantity to London and other markets. The note "seasonable at any time" is the book's standard tag for a dish that depends on nothing perishable or annual - a small reminder of how much of the rest of the household calendar did.