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Mustard
Put butter in chafing-dish; when melted, add flour.
Pour on, gradually, cream, and as soon as mixture thickens add tomatoes mixed with soda; then add cheese, eggs, and seasonings to taste. Serve, as soon as cheese has melted, on Graham Toast.
This is a tomato-cheese rarebit for the chafing-dish, and as printed it gives no quantities at all — the heading has come adrift from its ingredient list. Treat it as a method rather than a formula.
- Missing quantitiesThe verbatim text names butter, flour, cream, tomatoes, soda, cheese, eggs and seasoning but measures none of them. A workable reconstruction, drawn from comparable recipes rather than from this page, would be roughly 1 tablespoon each butter and flour, 1/2 cup cream, 1 cup stewed or canned tomato, a pinch of soda, grated mild cheese to taste and 2 eggs.
- The hinge: gentle heatCheese and beaten egg in the same pan will curdle and string the moment the mixture approaches a simmer. Keep the blazer over hot water or the lowest possible flame, stir constantly, and pull it the second the cheese has gone smooth.
- The chafing-dishThe vessel is a shallow pan (the blazer) over a spirit lamp, often set in a hot-water bath. A heavy saucepan over low heat, or a bowl over barely simmering water, does the same job with less drama.
- Why the sodaA pinch of baking soda neutralises the acid in the tomato so it will not curdle the cream and cheese. Use the smallest amount that stops the curdling — excess soda tastes soapy and dulls the tomato.
- The tomatoesPeriod recipes mean stewed or canned tomato, drained of its thinnest liquid, not raw diced tomato. Too much free water will slacken the sauce past the point where the roux can hold it.
- The cheeseA mild young cheese was most likely meant — the soft American or "factory" cheese of the day. A mild cheddar grated fine melts closest to it; aged, dry cheeses break into oil and threads.
- Graham toastBread made with Graham flour, a coarse unsifted whole wheat, toasted dry. Any sturdy whole-wheat bread stands in; slice it thick enough to carry a wet sauce without collapsing.
- YieldMade at the quantities above, enough for four slices of toast as a supper or late-evening dish.
Chafing-dish cookery was a genuine craze in American cities in the 1890s and early 1900s: the apparatus let a hostess cook at the table without a servant, which suited both the small flat and the after-theatre supper. Such dishes tend to be variations on a few ideas — creamed shellfish, eggs, and rarebits — because the spirit lamp gives gentle, unreliable heat and can do little more than melt and thicken. This tomato version belongs to the long line of Welsh rarebit offshoots that American cookbooks multiplied through the period, the tomato and the pinch of soda being a common trick for adding acidity to a cheese sauce without splitting it. The Graham toast underneath is a nod to Sylvester Graham's whole-meal flour, by then long detached from his reforming diet and simply a bread people liked.