Home › Chafing-Dish Cookery › Cheese Scramble
Cheese Scramble
6 eggs 4 tablespoons milk 1 tablespoon butter 1 cup broken cheese Salt and pepper Beat the eggs thoroughly and stir into them the milk and seasoning. Melt the butter in the chafing dish; pour in the eggs and milk; then the cheese. Stir occasionally until the eggs are cooked. Serve with crisp crackers.
A straightforward chafing-dish supper dish that survives translation to a skillet with almost no adjustment. The only real risk is overcooking.
- Chafing dish equivalentThe chafing dish sat over a spirit lamp or hot-water pan, giving gentle, indirect heat. A heavy skillet or nonstick pan over low heat does the same job; a double boiler is closer still if you want insurance against curdling.
- "Broken cheese"Cheese broken or crumbled by hand rather than grated. A firm cheddar or a mix of cheddar and Gruyère works; one cup of broken pieces is roughly 4 ounces, depending on how coarsely it is broken and how tightly packed.
- The hinge: stop earlyEggs with cheese in them keep cooking after they leave the heat, and the cheese holds heat well. Pull the pan when the curds are still visibly moist and slightly loose, or you will get a rubbery, weeping scramble.
- When to add the cheeseThe recipe adds it with the eggs. Holding back half until the eggs are half set gives you distinct melted pockets rather than a uniform cheese-egg paste — either is legitimate, but the second reads better on the plate.
- "Stir occasionally"Occasionally, not constantly. Large soft curds come from letting the egg set for several seconds between passes with a spatula; steady stirring gives you fine, grainy curds.
- SaltSeason lightly. A cup of aged cheddar carries a good deal of salt, so taste before adding more.
- YieldSix eggs serves three as a light supper or four alongside other chafing-dish courses. The crisp crackers are not decoration — they supply the only texture in the dish.
Chafing-dish cookery had a genuine vogue in American households from the 1890s through the 1920s, and cookbooks of the period gave it considerable attention. The appeal was social rather than culinary: the dish sat on the table over its own spirit lamp, so a hostess could cook a late supper in front of guests after the theatre, or a bachelor or a college student could produce hot food in a room with no stove. The repertoire that grew up around it was necessarily narrow, shaped by unreliable heat, which in practice meant eggs, cheese, oysters, creamed shellfish and Welsh rarebit. A cheese scramble is about as plain as that repertoire gets, and the instruction to serve it with crisp crackers rather than toast may well reflect the equipment: a chafing-dish supper assumed no oven and no broiler in the room.