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Cheese Fondu
Place five or six eggs in a saucepan, mix in a third of their weight of grated Parmesan cheese, and half this quantity of butter, and stir well over a slack fire until the eggs are set. Pour the mixture into a dish, and serve very hot. Slices of toast should go with this.
This is not melted-cheese fondue for dipping but the older French sense of the word: eggs and cheese stirred slowly to a soft, creamy curd. Everything depends on keeping the heat low enough that the eggs never set into lumps.
- The hinge: low, patient heat"A slack fire" means the gentlest heat you have. Use a heavy saucepan over low heat or, more reliably, a bowl over barely simmering water, stirring constantly with a wooden spoon until the mixture thickens to a loose custard. Pulled off the heat while still slightly underset, it finishes in the dish; taken to "set" on the burner it will curdle and weep.
- Working out the weightsFive or six eggs out of the shell come to roughly 9 to 11 oz (250-300 g). A third of that is about 3 to 3.5 oz (85-100 g) grated Parmesan, and half that quantity of butter is about 1.5 to 1.75 oz (43-50 g). Weighing is worth the trouble here, since the ratio is what makes the texture.
- "Mix in a saucepan"Oscar has you combine the eggs with the cheese and butter in the pan before any heat is applied, rather than melting the butter first. The recipe does not say to beat the eggs first, nor specify the butter's temperature.
- ParmesanGrate it yourself from a block of Parmigiano-Reggiano or a good grana. Pre-grated cheese carries anti-caking starch and cellulose that will make the fondu grainy, and the dish has nothing else to hide behind.
- SaltNone is called for, and with this much Parmesan very little is needed. Season at the end, after tasting, and add pepper then as well.
- TimingExpect 8 to 12 minutes of stirring over low heat, longer in a double boiler. There is no way to hurry it, and no point in trying.
- Yield and serviceEnough for three as a light supper or first course, two if it is the whole meal. Serve it the moment it leaves the pan, in a warmed dish, with hot buttered toast cut into fingers; it stiffens and turns rubbery as it cools and does not reheat.
"Fondu" here carries its literal French meaning, melted, and refers to a family of egg-and-cheese preparations quite distinct from the Swiss communal pot. The best-known ancestor is the fondue described by Brillat-Savarin in Physiologie du Goût (1825), essentially eggs beaten with a proportion of Gruyère and butter and stirred to a cream, the butter amounting to a sixth of the weight of the eggs, or half the weight of the cheese. Oscar Tschirky's Cook Book (1896) was assembled while he was maître d'hôtel at the Waldorf, and it reflects the classical French repertoire the hotel's kitchens worked from; short, ratio-based entries like this one assume a reader with a trained cook's hands rather than a home reader needing every step spelled out. The dish belongs to the era's supper and after-theatre menus, where a hot savory of eggs and cheese on toast had its place.