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Cheese Sauce
2 to 4 ounces cheese
1 cup medium or thin white
1
Mustard and paprika sauce
Put the cheese through a food-chopper. Mix with the white sauce. Set over hot water and stir until the cheese is thoroughly blended with the sauce. Season with mustard and paprika.
A short, unfussy Mornay-style sauce that assumes you already know how to make white sauce and own a double boiler. The whole thing hinges on gentle heat.
- The hinge: gentle heatSet over hot, not boiling, water and stir only until the cheese melts. Cheese sauce that gets too hot breaks, and the proteins tighten into strings while the fat pools out.
- What thin and medium white sauce meanBy the usual period convention, thin white sauce is about 1 tablespoon butter and 1 tablespoon flour per cup of milk and medium about 2 tablespoons of each, though this page does not restate the proportions. Use medium if the sauce is going over fish or into a gratin, thin if it is being poured at the table.
- The food-chopperA hand-cranked grinder clamped to the table edge. Grating on the coarse side of a box grater does the same job and melts just as readily; shredding fine also helps the cheese blend before the sauce overheats.
- Which cheeseThe recipe says only 'cheese'; in an American book of this period that most likely meant a firm aged cheddar or a dry "store cheese." Two ounces per cup gives a mild sauce, four ounces a pronounced one. Pre-shredded cheese is coated with starch or cellulose and gives a slightly grainy result.
- Mustard and paprikaNeither is quantified. Dry mustard is the likely intent, and a small pinch sharpens cheese more than it tastes of mustard; the paprika is presumably a sweet, mild one, used as much for color as flavor.
- SaltNo salt is listed, presumably because the white sauce and the cheese were expected to carry it. Taste at the end; aged cheddar varies widely.
- YieldAbout 1 1/4 cups, enough to sauce four servings of fish or a pound of cooked vegetables.
Cheese sauce in an American household book of this period sits close to the French sauce Mornay -- a white sauce enriched with cheese, sometimes but not always with egg yolks -- and belongs to the large family of dishes built on white sauce that dominated middle-class cooking from the late nineteenth century into the 1930s. The Butterick book was published by the pattern company as part of its broader domestic-advice publishing. The instruction to put cheese through a food-chopper is a small period marker: the crank grinder was common kitchen equipment, used for meat, nuts, dried fruit and, apparently, cheese.