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Cheese Sauce
2 to 4 ounces cheese Mustard and paprika 1 cup medium or thin white sauce Put the cheese through a food-chopper. Mix with the white sauce. Set over hot water and stir until the cheese is thoroughly blended with the sauce. Season with mustard and paprika.
A plain mornay-style sauce built on a béchamel base, with the cheese melted off direct heat. The whole point is the double boiler: cheese heated too fast in a flour sauce turns grainy and weeps fat.
- White sauce proportionsThe book assumes you know the standard ratios: thin white sauce is 1 tablespoon butter and 1 tablespoon flour per cup of milk, medium is 2 tablespoons of each. Cook the flour in the butter a minute or two before adding milk, then simmer until it no longer tastes of raw starch.
- Set over hot waterThis means a double boiler or a bowl over a pan of barely simmering water. Melting the cheese over direct heat is what makes cheese sauce stringy or oily.
- Which cheeseThe book says only "cheese"; recipes of this kind most likely intend a firm aged Cheddar or a dry American "store cheese." A well-aged Cheddar, Gruyère or a mix melts smoothly; pre-shredded bagged cheese carries anti-caking starch and can go pasty.
- The food-chopperA hand-cranked grinder was the era's way of reducing a hard cheese to small pieces so it would melt evenly. Coarse grating on a box grater does the same job.
- Seasoning amountsNo quantities are given for the mustard and paprika. Start with 1/4 teaspoon dry mustard and a scant 1/4 teaspoon paprika per cup, and taste; the mustard is there to sharpen the cheese rather than to be tasted on its own.
- SaltThe white sauce should be seasoned before the cheese goes in, then checked again afterward, since a hard aged cheese brings considerable salt of its own.
- Yield and useAbout 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 cups depending on whether 2 or 4 ounces of cheese is used, enough for roughly four servings poured over poached fish, boiled cauliflower, macaroni or toast. It thickens as it cools; loosen with a spoonful of milk over the hot water rather than over the burner.
Cheese sauce in American cookbooks of the 1920s and 30s is usually a white sauce with cheese stirred in, taught as one of a graduated family of sauces — thin for soups, medium for creaming vegetables, thick for croquettes — a ratio that home economics teaching of the period encouraged cooks to memorize. The New Delineator Recipes came out of The Delineator, a Butterick magazine whose household pages carried that domestic-science approach, which may be why the recipe gives no white sauce method: the reader was expected to have it by heart. The food-chopper called for here was a common fixture of the period kitchen, clamped to the table edge and used for everything from hash to nuts.