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Cheese Sauce
1 pint white sauce. 1 cup cream cheese. 1/2 teaspoon grated onion. Serve hot; good with fish.
A four-line sauce that assumes you already have a pint of white sauce standing by. The only real technique is heat control: the cheese goes in off the boil.
- The hinge: keep it below a simmerAdd the cheese to the finished white sauce over low heat, or off the heat entirely, and stir until smooth. Boiled cheese sauce breaks — the proteins tighten and squeeze out fat, leaving a grainy sauce with an oil slick.
- What "cream cheese" meantThe term then covered a range of fresh, soft, unripened cheeses; commercial cream cheese was also on sale, though without the gum stabilizers in today's brick. Modern block cream cheese works and gives a thick, tangy sauce; a fresh farmer's cheese or fromage blanc is also close. A cup is about 8 oz.
- The white sauceA pint is 2 cups. The recipe assumes you already have a white sauce made and does not say which; a common proportion is butter and flour cooked together, then milk whisked in and simmered until it coats a spoon. Cook the flour a full minute or two before the milk goes in or the sauce tastes pasty.
- Grated onionHalf a teaspoon of onion grated on a fine rasp — juice and pulp both. It is there as a background note, not a flavor you should identify. Grating rather than chopping means no raw crunch and no need to cook it out.
- Seasoning is left to youThe original gives no salt or pepper, presumably because the white sauce was already seasoned. Taste at the end; cream cheese is mild and the sauce will need salt, and a little white pepper and a scrape of nutmeg or mustard powder are traditional with fish.
- Yield and servingAbout 3 cups, enough for roughly six servings of poached or baked fish. Spoon it over at the table rather than holding it hot for long — it thickens as it stands, and a spoonful of hot milk will loosen it again.
Mrs. Wilson's book belongs to the moment when the flour-butter-milk white sauce had become the organizing principle of American home cooking: learn one base, then file the variations behind it. Cheese sauce, egg sauce, parsley sauce and the rest were taught as a single lesson with substitutions, which is why this entry can be four lines long — the reader was expected to turn back to the master recipe. Mary A. Wilson wrote for the Ladies' Home Journal in Philadelphia during and just after the First World War, and the terseness is characteristic of that period's push toward economy and system in the kitchen. The pairing with fish is not new either: cheese-and-fish combinations appear in earlier English cookery.