Home › Recipes For The Chafing-Dish › English Monkey
English Monkey
1 cup stale bread crumbs 1 cup milk 1 tablespoon butter 1/2 cup soft mild cheese, cut in small pieces 1 egg 1/2 teaspoon salt Few grains cayenne Soak bread crumbs fifteen minutes in milk. Melt butter, add cheese, and when cheese has melted, add soaked crumbs, egg slightly beaten, and seasonings. Cook three minutes, and pour over toasted crackers which have been spread sparingly with butter.
A chafing-dish supper dish, closely related to Welsh rarebit but stretched with bread and bound with egg. The whole thing takes under ten minutes once the crumbs have soaked, and the only real difficulty is keeping the egg from scrambling.
- The hinge: gentle heatOnce the egg goes in, the mixture must stay below a simmer or it will curdle into cheesy scrambled egg. The low, indirect heat a chafing dish gives suits it; on a modern stove use the lowest burner setting, or set a bowl over barely simmering water, and stir constantly for the three minutes.
- "Soft mild cheese"Most likely a young mild cheddar or a soft fresh American cheese of the period, rather than brie or modern packaged cream cheese. A mild yellow cheddar or a young Monterey Jack, coarsely grated rather than cut in pieces, melts smoothly and matches the intent.
- Stale bread crumbsSoft crumbs torn from day-old white bread, not dry toasted crumbs from a canister. Dried commercial crumbs will absorb the milk into paste; if that is all you have, use about two-thirds of a cup and expect a stiffer result.
- The soakFifteen minutes is a minimum, not a maximum. The crumbs should be fully slack and break apart under a spoon, or you will get lumps of wet bread suspended in the cheese.
- Cayenne"Few grains" is a scant pinch, roughly 1/16 teaspoon. It is there for warmth against the richness, not for heat; dry mustard, about 1/4 teaspoon, was a common alternative in the same books.
- Toasted crackersCommon crackers or water biscuits, split and toasted. Saltines are the closest cheap equivalent; a plain water cracker or matzo holds up better under the sauce. Toast them dry, then butter thinly, or they go soft immediately.
- YieldEnough for two as a light supper or four as a savoury course. It does not hold or reheat well, so serve it straight from the pan.
"Monkey" here is almost certainly a corruption of the same word behind Welsh rabbit or rarebit, a family of melted-cheese dishes that English and American cooks passed around under a tangle of joking names through the nineteenth century; the connection is traditional rather than documented, and no one has pinned down who first attached "monkey" to the dish. What is clear is why it sits among Fannie Farmer's cheese recipes. The chafing dish was a fashionable piece of equipment in the 1890s, sold to households for late suppers after the theatre or for women entertaining without troubling the kitchen, and cheese dishes seem to have figured prominently in its repertoire because they cooked fast, needed no oven, and could be made at the table. The addition of bread crumbs and an egg to a cheese sauce is thrift as much as texture: it doubles the volume of half a cup of cheese and gives the mixture enough body to sit on a cracker without sliding off.