Cheese-Sticks
Cut stale bread in long, narrow strips, spread with butter or butter substitute and then with a thick coating of grated cheese. Place in the oven until brown. Crackers may be treated in a similar manner. These should be passed when the soup is served. GARNISHES
Garnishes should be simple, appropriate, easy to prepare, but they should not be used to disguise deficiencies or poor qualities of any dish. Edible garnishes are more appropriate than those that are used merely for appearance. At least one-third of a dish should be left free of garnish. The garnish should be so placed that it does not interfere with the service. With a few exceptions, such as candied or maraschino cherries, sweet pickles or preserved whole currants, strawberries or cranberries, sweets are not used to garnish savory dishes. Toast or puff pastes should not, as a rule, be used on the same dish with potatoes.
A soup accompaniment rather than a course in itself, and about as simple as a recipe gets. The only real variables are the oven heat and the cheese.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given. Use 375-400F on a sheet pan and watch them; five to eight minutes is usually enough. Any hotter and the cheese scorches before the bread crisps through.
- "Butter substitute"In a book of this period the phrase would most often have meant oleomargarine, though a vegetable shortening is also possible. Butter is better here, and a thin scrape is plenty since the cheese supplies most of the fat.
- Choosing the cheeseA dry, sharp grating cheese behaves best: aged Cheddar, Parmesan, or a mix. Fresh mozzarella or a soft young cheese will weep and pool rather than brown.
- Stale bread is the pointDay-old bread has lost enough moisture to crisp all the way to the centre. Fresh bread steams inside and goes leathery as it cools, so let sliced bread sit out uncovered for a few hours if you have none stale.
- CuttingSlices about half an inch thick, cut into strips roughly half an inch wide and three to four inches long. Trimming the crusts gives a neater stick but is not necessary.
- CrackersPlain unsalted or lightly salted crackers work; already-seasoned crackers plus cheese ends up very salty. They brown faster than bread, so give them three or four minutes.
- Yield and servingFigure two or three sticks per person. "Passed" means offered round on a plate or napkin-lined dish as the soup goes out.
Cheese-sticks belong to a family of soup accompaniments that filled the gap between the bread basket and the fancier restaurant garnish: croutons, cheese straws made from puff paste, bread sticks, cheese wafers. All of them are usually said to share the same practical logic of a period kitchen, in which stale bread was presumably too valuable to throw away and grated cheese ends too valuable to waste. The paragraph on garnishes that follows here is characteristic of American domestic-science writing, which treated table presentation as a set of teachable rules rather than a matter of taste. The instruction that a garnish should never disguise "deficiencies or poor qualities" is a small piece of the same reforming spirit that produced measured cups: the cook was to be honest, systematic, and economical, in that order.