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Get Ready Quick Lunch
Slice bread. Cover bread with thin slices of Young American Cheese. Over this place two small strips of bacon. Toast on broiler until bacon is crisp and brown. Should be eaten at once.
— Inez Curtis
An open-faced cheese-and-bacon toast, cooked under a broiler in one pass. The whole thing hinges on the bacon crisping in the same time the cheese melts, which is the part most likely to go wrong.
- Young American cheeseA domestic cheddar, not the processed slices sold as "American" today. "Young America" was a name for a small cheddar cheese sold young: mild, pale and quick to melt. A mild or medium block cheddar, sliced thin, is the closest match; a deli-cut American slice will also melt cleanly but tastes flatter.
- Bacon thicknessUse thin-cut bacon and cut the strips narrow. Thick-cut will still be flabby when the cheese has melted and the bread has scorched. Two narrow strips per slice is about right for standard sandwich bread.
- Broiler distanceSet the rack about 4-6 inches below the element rather than directly under it. Closer and the bacon fat spits and burns before the cheese has slumped; the recipe gives no time, so watch it — the aim is for both to finish together.
- The breadA firm bakery or home-baked white loaf, cut thick, suits this best. Sliced sandwich bread works but toast one side dry first, then build on the toasted face so the base does not go soggy under the melting cheese.
- Catch the fatBacon on an open broiler pan drips. Line the pan or use a rack over foil; rendered fat pooling under the element is the usual cause of a smoking kitchen.
- Eat at onceThe instruction is not politeness. Melted young cheddar firms up rubbery within a few minutes and the toast steams from underneath. Serve straight off the pan.
- YieldReckon two slices per person for a light lunch, with a pickle or sliced tomato alongside.
This is a plain version of a dish that turns up across early twentieth-century American community cookbooks under names like "cheese dreams" and "bacon and cheese toast" — a quicker relative of Welsh rabbit, which was often made in a chafing dish. Broilers in gas and electric home ranges, along with sliced factory bacon and mild block cheddar sold by the pound at the grocer, would have made a lunch like this practical. Philathea cookbooks were compiled by the Philathea classes, the young women's counterpart to the Baraca classes for young men within the Baraca-Philathea Bible class movement, which spread through American Protestant churches from the 1890s onward; the books were fundraisers, and recipes were signed by the contributor, as this one is. Short, unfussy entries like this one tell you something about who was cooking: women with a stove, a broiler, limited time, and no expectation that lunch should be elaborate.