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English Monkey
1 cup bread-crums
1 egg
1 cup milk
½ teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon butter
¼ teaspoon pepper
½ cup mild American cheese
Toast
Soak the bread-crums in the milk until they are soft. Melt the butter in the pan. Add the cheese cut in dice. When the cheese has melted, add the softened crums, the egg beaten, and salt and pepper. Cook three minutes longer and pour the hot mixture over squares of toast. This recipe serves four to six persons.
A chafing-dish supper dish of the Welsh rarebit family, thickened with bread rather than flour. It comes together in a few minutes, and the only real danger is heat.
- Keep the heat lowThis is the hinge. Once the egg goes in, the mixture must stay well below a simmer or it will scramble into curds in the cheese. A double boiler, or the blazer pan of a chafing dish over water, is safer than direct flame.
- "Mild American cheese"At the time this meant a young, mild factory cheddar, not the processed slice of later years. Use a mild yellow cheddar or Colby, grated rather than diced so it melts before the egg has time to set.
- Bread-crumsSoft fresh crumbs from the inside of a loaf, not dry packaged breadcrumbs, which will absorb the milk and turn to paste. Tear up a couple of slices of day-old white bread and let them sit in the milk five minutes.
- The table grillServing hot -- A chafing dish or spirit lamp at the table suits this dish, but a small heavy saucepan on the lowest burner does the same job; carry it to the table and spoon out at once, as the mixture stiffens as it cools.
- Three minutesTimed from when the egg goes in, and it means three minutes of gentle stirring until the mixture just thickens to a pouring sauce. Longer gives you a grainy scramble.
- Toast and yieldServes four to six as written, which works out to a modest portion each; figure on two squares of toast per person. Toast it dry and firm so it holds up under the sauce.
"English monkey" is one of a small family of American chafing-dish names — Welsh rabbit or rarebit, golden buck, blushing bunny — in which a cheese sauce over toast is given a jokey animal name. The monkey version, thickened with milk-soaked bread rather than relying on cheese alone, turns up in American cookbooks and domestic-science manuals from the 1890s onward, and the name is often said to be a playful corruption of the older "rabbit," though its actual origin is undocumented. Its place in a Butterick household book is telling: chafing-dish cookery was fashionable for late suppers and informal entertaining in the early 1900s, a way for a hostess to produce something hot at the table without a servant.