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Cheese Fondue
1 cup soft stale bread crumbs ¼ lb. mild cheese, cut in small pieces 1 tablespoon butter 1/2 teaspoon salt Yolks 3 eggs Whites 3 eggs Mix first five ingredients, add yolks of eggs beaten until lemon-colored. Cut and fold in whites of eggs beaten until stiff. Pour in a buttered baking-dish, and bake twenty minutes in a moderate oven.
Cheese Soufflé Few grains cayenne 1/4 cup grated Old English or Young America cheese 2 tablespoons butter 3 tablespoons flour 1/2 cup scalded milk 1/2 teaspoon salt Whites 3 eggs Yolks 3 eggs Melt butter, add flour, and when well-mixed add gradually scalded milk. Then add salt, cayenne, and cheese. Remove from fire; add yolks of eggs beaten until lemoncolored. Cool mixture, and cut and fold in whites of eggs beaten until stiff and dry. Pour into a buttered bakingdish, and bake twenty minutes in a slow oven. at once.
Ramequins Soufflés
This is a baked cheese pudding rather than the Swiss pot of melted cheese the name now suggests. It behaves like a loose soufflé and wants the same handling.
- Oven temperatureA "moderate oven" is conventionally reckoned at somewhere around 350F, though the book gives no figures in degrees. Twenty minutes at that heat sets a shallow dish; a deeper one will need closer to 30 minutes and should come out just barely firm at the centre.
- The quantity of cheeseThe printed "14 lb." is a quarter pound, that is 4 oz, roughly a cup grated. A full 14 lb would be absurd against three eggs.
- The liquidAs printed the mixture has no liquid at all, yet the method calls for combining five ingredients before the yolks go in. A cup of scalded milk is what belongs there, poured hot over the crumbs and cheese and left to soften before the eggs are added.
- What "mild cheese" meantA young factory Cheddar, the sort sold as American or store cheese around 1900. Any mild Cheddar or Monterey Jack works; a sharp aged cheese will break and go oily at this ratio.
- Soft stale bread crumbsNot dry crumbs from a box. Tear day-old white bread and rub it into coarse soft flakes, about a cup lightly packed. Dry crumbs absorb far more liquid and give a heavy, pasty result.
- FoldingBeat the whites to a firm peak and fold in two additions, cutting down through the mixture rather than stirring. This is the only leavening in the dish, and the difference between light and leaden.
- Serving and yieldServes three to four as a light entrée or supper dish. It falls within a few minutes of leaving the oven, so bring it straight to the table.
This "Cheese Fondue" belongs to an American line of baked cheese dishes that had drifted well away from the Swiss original, where fondue means cheese melted with wine in a communal pot and eaten with bread. By the late nineteenth century the word was widely used in English and American cookbooks for a crumb-and-egg cheese pudding baked in a dish, essentially a thrifty cousin of the souffl instead of a butter-and-flour base. The cheeses named in the neighbouring recipes, Old English and Young America, were both commercial Cheddar types familiar on American grocery counters at the time.