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Cheese Confections (Blazer into the bath add)
blazer into the bath, add the crumbs and cheese, and cook and stir until the cheese is melted and the mixture becomes smooth; add the eggs, beaten until light, and serve at once.
1 cup of milk.
1 egg.
This is the tail end of a chafing-dish cheese mixture, printed here without its opening lines, so the full ingredient list is missing — only the milk and egg survive at the foot of the page. What remains is still enough to work from if you treat it as a rarebit-style cheese cream thickened with crumbs.
- The blazer and the bathA chafing dish has two pans: the blazer, which sits over the flame, and the hot-water pan or bath beneath it. "Blazer into the bath" means move the cheese pan off direct heat and onto the water pan. On a modern stove, this is a bowl or saucepan set over barely simmering water.
- What the fragment is missingThe quantities of cheese and crumbs are not in the surviving text and cannot be recovered from it. As a working reconstruction, for a cup of milk roughly 1/2 lb grated cheese and 1/2 to 3/4 cup soft breadcrumbs will give the consistency the method describes.
- Cheese for meltingThe fragment does not name a cheese; a firm aged cheddar of the sort commonly sold at the time suits the method. Grate rather than cube it, and add it in handfuls; pre-shredded cheese carries anti-caking starch that dulls the texture.
- Never let it boilThe whole reason for the water bath is that direct heat makes melted cheese seize into strings with a pool of fat around them. Keep the water below a simmer and stir steadily until smooth.
- The eggThe method says "the eggs" while the surviving ingredient line gives one egg; the beaten egg or eggs go in at the very end and set the mixture just enough to hold on toast. Temper first with a spoonful or two of the hot cheese, then stir back in and cook only until it thickens — a minute at most. Held longer, it scrambles.
- Crumbs"Crumbs" here most likely means soft fresh breadcrumbs rather than dried or seasoned crumbs. They absorb the milk and their starch helps keep the cheese from separating.
- Serving"Serve at once" is literal: the mixture stiffens and turns grainy as it cools and does not reheat well. No yield is given in the surviving text; serve over toast points or crackers.
Chafing-dish cookery had a long vogue in American homes from the 1890s into the 1910s, and books of this kind were written for it: a spirit lamp, a blazer pan, a water pan, and a repertoire of dishes that could be made at the table in front of guests. Cheese preparations were a staple of that repertoire, because melted cheese is quick, needs no oven, and looks like a performance while it comes together. The two-pan design addresses the problem this recipe hinges on — cheese held over an open flame breaks, while cheese held over hot water does not. Recipes in this vein descend from Welsh rabbit, a British dish that by the late nineteenth century had many American variants stretched with milk, crumbs, or egg. The truncated text here is an artifact of the scan rather than the cook: the page begins mid-sentence, and "I cup of milk. I egg." stands at the foot of the page, though which recipe those quantities belong to cannot be determined from this fragment.