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Toasted Cheese to Come Up After Dinner
1143. Grate three ounces of fat Cheshire cheese, mix it with the yolks of two eggs, four ounces of grated bread, and three ounces of butter; beat the whole well in a mortar with a dessert-spoonful of mustard, and a little salt and pepper. Toast some bread, cut it into proper pieces, lay the paste, as above, thick upon them into a Dutch oven, covered with a dish, till hot through; remove the dish, and let the cheese brown a little. Serve as hot as possible.
A rich cheese paste baked onto toast, meant to close a meal rather than open one. The quantities make a very stiff, buttery mixture, and the hinge is heat management: it needs to warm through under cover before it is browned, or the outside scorches while the centre is cold.
- YieldRoughly 10 oz of paste, enough to cover six to eight small toasts thickly. As a savoury after dinner, allow one or two per person.
- Fat Cheshire cheese"Fat" here means a full-cream cheese rather than the thin skimmed-milk cheeses also sold at the time. A crumbly Cheshire is ideal; Lancashire or a sharp Cheddar behaves much the same way. Three ounces grated is roughly three-quarters of a cup, loosely packed.
- Grated breadDried breadcrumbs, not the soft fresh kind. Four ounces is about a cup, and it is what stops the mixture running off the toast.
- The mustardA dessert-spoonful is about two teaspoons. Mustard in a British kitchen of this date usually means dry powder mixed to a paste, or the made paste itself; two teaspoons of dry English mustard powder will be forceful, so start with one and taste.
- Mortar workThe pounding is there to bind butter, yolks, crumbs and cheese into one smooth paste. A food processor does it in twenty seconds; take the butter to room temperature first or it will stay in lumps.
- Dutch ovenProbably not the cast-iron pot: in British kitchens of this period a Dutch oven was usually an open-fronted tin reflector set before the fire. The original gives no temperature; a modern approximation is a hot oven, around 400F, with the tray loosely covered in foil until the paste is hot through, then uncovered under the grill or broiler for a minute or two to brown.
- Toast the bread firstThe bread goes under the paste already toasted. Untoasted bread will steam under the covering and collapse into a sodden base.
- ServingIt sets and turns greasy as it cools, which is why the original insists on serving it as hot as possible. Cut the toasts small and bring them straight from the heat.
This belongs to the British savoury, the small hot, salty course served after the sweet and before the dessert fruit, a fixture of nineteenth-century dinners that survived in clubs and colleges long after it vanished from home tables. It is a first cousin to Welsh rabbit and to the many "toasted cheese" recipes of the period, but where rabbit is cheese melted with ale or milk and poured over toast, this version pounds the cheese into a butter-and-crumb paste that can be spread thick and browned, which holds its shape better on a plate passed round a table. Cheshire is the natural choice: it was among the most widely traded English cheeses of the day, sent to London in great quantity by canal and coastal boat, and its dry crumbling texture grates and pounds more readily than a close-textured cheese. The specification of a "fat" cheese is a genuine distinction of the period, when much cheap cheese was made from skimmed milk and had a reputation for toughness under heat.