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Baked Crackers with Cheese
10 butter crackers or Boston. 1 tablespoon flour 1/4 teaspoon salt 1/2 cup buttered bread crumbs crackers 1½ cups milk 1 cup grated cheese Split the crackers if they are thick and with a sharp knife cut them into pieces of uniform size. Pour the milk over them and drain it off at once. Then make a sauce with the milk, flour, cheese and salt. Into a buttered baking dish put alternate layers of soaked cracker and sauce. Cover with bread crumbs and brown in the oven.
A scalloped cracker dish that depends entirely on restraint with the milk. The crackers are dipped and drained, not soaked, or the layers collapse into paste.
- The crackersAlmost certainly plain soda crackers — saltines or a similar unsweetened square — though the book does not specify. The recipe gives no quantity; figure on 18 to 24 crackers to absorb 1 1/2 cups of milk and fill a small baking dish, and split them only if they are thick enough to separate cleanly.
- The dip, not a soak"Pour the milk over them and drain it off at once" is literal. The crackers should be wetted on the surface and still firm; if they sit, they turn to mush and there is nothing left to layer. Reserve the drained milk for the sauce.
- Butter for the sauceThe ingredient list omits it, but a flour-and-milk sauce needs fat. Melt 1 tablespoon butter, stir in the tablespoon of flour, cook a minute, then add the drained milk. This is a thin sauce by design — it thickens further as the crackers drink it in the oven.
- Cheese off the heatAdd the grated cheese after the sauce has thickened and the pan is off the burner. Cheese boiled in a white sauce goes stringy and weeps oil. A mild to medium cheddar or a firm American-style cheese is the likeliest reading of the book's unqualified "grated cheese."
- SaltA quarter teaspoon is modest, and the crackers and the cheese both bring salt of their own. Taste the sauce before adding any more.
- Buttered bread crumbsDry crumbs tossed with about 2 tablespoons melted butter — the butter is what browns them. Fresh soft crumbs will steam rather than crisp.
- OvenThe original names no heat. A moderately hot oven, 375–400F, for 20 to 25 minutes, until the top is browned and the edges bubble. There is nothing raw in the dish, so you are only heating through and colouring the crumbs.
- YieldServes three as a light main course in a 1-quart dish, or four as a side. It is best straight from the oven; reheated, the crackers lose all texture.
This sits in the "Meat Substitutes" chapter, a fixture of American cookbooks from the late nineteenth century onward, in which cheese, eggs, beans and nuts were pressed into service as the protein of the meal. Cheese was the workhorse of that chapter: cheap, keeping well, and understood — correctly — to be concentrated nourishment. Scalloped cracker dishes of this type recommended themselves for a second reason: soda crackers kept indefinitely in a tin, cost little, and could stand in for bread crumbs or a starch course when baking bread was inconvenient. The technique is the old scalloped formula that runs through nineteenth-century American cookery — alternate layers of a starch and a sauce, crumbs on top, brown in the oven — applied here to whatever the pantry held rather than to oysters or potatoes.