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Cheese Fondue
Take one-fourth pound of cheese; six eggs; three tablespoons of butter; one level teaspoon of salt; oneeighth teaspoon of white pepper and four slices of fried or toasted bread cut in halves. Grate the cheese, beat the eggs till they are light, add them to the butter, cheese and seasoning. Pour into a saucepan; set this in another of boiling water, stir until the cheese is smooth and creamy. Lay the toast on a hot plate, pour the fondue over it and serve at once.
CHEESE SOUFFLÉ-Take two and one-half tablespoons of flour, three eggs, one and one-half pints (scant) milk, one-fourth pound of grated Parmesan cheese. Beat the yolks of the eggs well, thin them with a little of the milk, and add the grated cheese. Rub the flour to a paste with a little more of the milk. Heat in a porcelain-lined stewpan the remainder of the milk and when it boils, stir in the flour paste. Stir until the whole is smooth and creamy, and add the mixture of cheese and yolks. Boil the liquid about a minute or until the cheese is fully melted, and remove from the fire. Whip the whites of the eggs to a stiff froth, and stir them into the mixture. Fill some paper cases with this preparation,
Two recipes run together here, and neither is what a modern cook expects from the names. The fondue is a stirred cheese-and-egg custard served over toast, not a pot of melted cheese for dipping; the soufflé is a stovetop-thickened base that the page cuts off mid-instruction.
- The hinge: gentle heatThe saucepan set in boiling water is doing the whole job. Six eggs and four ounces of cheese will curdle into cheesy scrambled eggs the moment the mixture goes much above 170F, so keep the water at a bare simmer and stir constantly until it thickens to the consistency of loose custard.
- QuantitiesOne-fourth pound of cheese is 4 oz, about one cup firmly packed when grated. Three tablespoons of butter is generous but correct for six eggs; it is what keeps the mixture from tightening.
- What cheeseThe recipe says only "cheese," which in this period most likely meant a firm, dry, sharp cheese of the kind then sold plainly as "cheese" in America, i.e. an aged factory Cheddar. A well-aged Cheddar or a Gruyere works; fresh mild supermarket Cheddar carries too much moisture and will weep.
- YieldFour slices of toast, halved, and six eggs makes four modest servings as a supper or luncheon dish. It does not hold, so have the toast made and the plates hot before you start stirring.
- The souffle's milkOne and one-half pints scant is a little under three cups. With only two and a half tablespoons of flour that gives a very thin base, which is why the recipe relies on three whipped whites and small paper cases rather than one large dish.
- Porcelain-lined stewpanAn enamelled or otherwise nonreactive pan. Bare cast iron or unlined copper will discolour a milk-and-cheese sauce and give it a metallic edge; any modern stainless or enamelled saucepan is fine.
- The souffle is incompleteThe text breaks off at "Fill some paper cases with this preparation." The missing step is presumably baking, but the page gives no oven heat or timing, and none can be recovered from what survives here.
- ParmesanA quarter pound of Parmesan is 4 oz, about one and a half cups finely grated. The recipe calls for no salt at all, so taste the base before adding any.
The word comes from the French fondre, to melt, but the English-language "fondue" of nineteenth-century cookbooks is not the Swiss communal pot of wine and cheese. It is closer to the version in Brillat-Savarin's La Physiologie du Gout (1825), which is essentially eggs beaten with grated cheese and butter and stirred smooth over heat. That is much the dish here. Butterick, a pattern company that expanded into household manuals for the same subscribers who bought its dress patterns, was writing for a cook who needed inexpensive hot dishes that used up a heel of cheese and turned toast into supper; the cheese chapter of such books sits squarely in the tradition of Welsh rarebit and its many respectable relations.