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Cheese Fondue
1 cup grated cheese
⅓ teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons butter
3 eggs
1 cup milk
Cayenne
1 cup soft bread-crums
Scald the milk and pour it over the crums, then add the butter or butter substitute, the cheese and seasonings. Beat the eggyolks slightly and add to the mixture, then fold in the stiffly beaten whites and turn the mixture into a greased baking-dish. Set in a pan of water and bake in a slow oven (300° F.) until firm on top.
One cup of cooked rice or other cereal may be substituted for the bread-crums.
This is not Swiss fondue for dipping but a baked cheese custard in the older sense of the word — closer to a soufflé stiffened with bread. The whole method hinges on the water bath and the low oven: cheese custard cooked fast or dry curdles and weeps.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives 300°F, which is genuinely slow, and it should be taken literally. Higher heat sets the eggs before the cheese has melted smoothly and squeezes out liquid.
- Water bathSet the greased dish in a pan and pour boiling water to come halfway up the sides. This is what keeps the custard tender; skipping it produces a rubbery layer at the bottom.
- Timing and donenessNo time is given. In a 1-quart dish expect 40 to 55 minutes — the top should be set and lightly puffed, with only the faintest wobble at the centre. It will sink somewhat as it cools, which is normal for this style.
- Soft bread-crumbsFresh crumbs from soft bread, not dry packaged breadcrumbs, which absorb far more milk and turn the mixture pasty. About two slices of white bread, crusts off, torn or pulsed coarse, gives one cup.
- The cheeseAn unspecified "grated cheese" in cookbooks of this period usually meant a firm cheese of the American or English cheddar type. About 3 to 4 ounces grated fills a cup. Pre-shredded cheese carries anti-caking starch that can make the custard grainy.
- Butter substituteThe phrase reflects the era's oleomargarine and vegetable shortenings, promoted when butter was dear or rationed. Butter is the better choice now, and two teaspoons is a small enough amount that the type matters little.
- CayenneNo quantity is given; a pinch, an eighth of a teaspoon or less, is the usual reading. It is there to sharpen the cheese, not to register as heat.
- YieldServes three or four as a light supper or luncheon dish, and wants little more than toast and a salad beside it.
"Fondue" here comes from the French fondre, to melt, and in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century English-language cookbooks the word was often applied to dishes of melted cheese bound with eggs; the communal pot of wine-and-Gruyère that now owns the word came into wide American use only later in the twentieth century. Recipes of this shape, with crumbs or cooked cereal stretching a modest cup of cheese, appear in domestic-science manuals of the period as an inexpensive meatless main dish: cheese was taught as a protein substitute for meat, and the bread-or-rice variation at the end allows whatever cooked cereal is on hand to be used. The Butterick books, published by the dress-pattern company for its readership of home sewers and housekeepers, traded in exactly this kind of economical, teachable cookery, and the offhand "or butter substitute" points to years when margarine and shortening were an ordinary presence in the American pantry.