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Cheese Fondue
INGREDIENTS. ¼ a pound of cheese broken 3/4 a cup of milk. into bits. 2 tablespoonfuls of butter.
A few grains of cayenne or paprica. 1/2 a cup of stale bread crumbs.
1 tablespoonful of flour.
1 saltspoonful, each, of soda and mustard. 3 eggs.
Method. - Sift the soda, mustard and cayenne into the flour and cook in the butter until frothy, then add the milk gradually; when the sauce boils, after all the milk has been added, put the
An American baked "fondue" — closer to a loose cheese soufflé than to anything Swiss — and the printed text is both garbled by the scanner and cut off mid-sentence. What follows fills in the gaps a competent cook will need.
- The mangled quantities"14 a pound of cheese" is 1/4 pound (4 oz), and the stray capital "I" throughout is the numeral 1. So: 1 tablespoon flour, 1 saltspoonful each of soda and mustard.
- A saltspoonfulA quarter teaspoon. With the mustard and cayenne the only other flavouring in the dish, measure rather than eyeball.
- The soda is deliberateA pinch of baking soda raises the pH slightly and keeps the cheese from breaking into strings and grease when the eggs set. It is not a leavener here. Do not increase it — more than a quarter teaspoon turns the mixture soapy and browns it oddly.
- The cheeseIn American cookbooks of this period an unqualified "cheese" generally meant firm factory cheddar. A sharp aged cheddar works; anything pre-shredded, with its anti-caking starch, will not melt as smoothly.
- How it finishesThe text breaks off. A plausible completion, on the pattern of similar period recipes: pour the boiling sauce over the crumbs and cheese, stir until melted, beat in three egg yolks, then fold in the whites beaten stiff, and bake in a buttered dish in a moderate oven -- roughly 350F -- until puffed and just set, perhaps 25 to 30 minutes. The recipe as printed gives no oven, no temperature, no time and no water bath; all of that is conjecture.
- Watch the heat on the sauceOnce the cheese goes in, keep it off direct heat. Boiling cheese in a flour sauce curdles the proteins and weeps fat, which is exactly what the soda is there to prevent.
- YieldFour ounces of cheese, three eggs and 3/4 cup milk make a small dish — two generous servings as a supper course, four as a savoury alongside salad.
The word "fondue" travelled oddly into American cookery. By the turn of the twentieth century it often did not mean the Swiss pot of wine-thickened cheese scraped up with bread; in American cookbooks of the Boston Cooking School type it meant a baked dish of cheese, milk, crumbs and separated eggs, essentially a thrifty souffle stretched with stale bread. Cheese dishes -- rarebits, fondues, ramekins -- belonged to a genuine fashion of the 1890s and 1900s, when the spirit-lamp chafing dish was the equipment of late suppers, bachelor rooms and after-theatre entertaining, because they cooked fast and needed no carving.