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Cheese Patties
Have a slice of bread one and one-half inches thick, cut it into small rounds with a cutter, hollow out the middle to form a little cup. Fry eight of these in butter, first dipping them in milk and egg and breadcrumbs. Mix together two ounces of grated cheese, one ounce of butter, a tablespoonful of milk, and a little salt and cayenne; fill the breads with this mixture, stand them in the oven, and when the cheese is melted, serve them.
A savoury of fried bread cases filled with a soft cheese paste — quick, but the frying step decides whether it works.
- The hinge: seal the cups before fryingDip the hollowed rounds in milk, then egg, then crumbs; the recipe says only to dip them, but coating the inside of the cup as well as the outside helps. An uncoated hollow can soak up butter and soften under the filling.
- Bread choiceA close-grained white loaf, cut a full 1½ inches (about 4 cm) thick as directed; slightly stale bread is easier to hollow than fresh, airy sandwich bread, which tears and turns greasy in the pan. The recipe specifies only 'small rounds' and no cutter size — a round cutter of roughly 2 inches and a teaspoon or small melon baller will do the shaping.
- QuantitiesTwo ounces of cheese is about 1/2 cup grated; one ounce of butter is 2 tablespoons. That paste is enough for eight small cases, roughly a tablespoon each.
- Which cheeseThe recipe says only 'grated cheese'; a firm English cheese such as Cheddar or Cheshire is the likely intention. Anything that melts smoothly works; avoid pre-shredded cheese, whose anti-caking additives can make the paste grainy.
- The fryingClarified butter, or butter with a little neutral oil, at moderate heat. Whole butter alone browns and burns before the crumb crust sets. Drain the cases on paper before filling.
- OvenNo temperature is given. A hot oven, 400–425°F, for 4–6 minutes is enough to melt the filling without drying the fried crust; the bread is already cooked.
- SeasoningRead 'a little cayenne' as a pinch, an eighth of a teaspoon at most. Salt lightly — the recipe asks only for 'a little salt', and the cheese brings some of its own.
- Yield and serviceEight patties, two per person as a savoury course or a warm canapé for four to six. They must go to the table immediately; reheated, the bread turns leathery.
Oscar Tschirky's book collects the small hot cheese dishes that filled the savoury slot at the end of a formal Anglo-American dinner — the course served after the sweet, before or with the last of the wine, a habit borrowed from English dining rooms and kept up in New York hotels through the turn of the century. Fried bread croustades of this kind were standard kitchen currency: cheap, fast, made from stale loaf, and endlessly refillable with cheese, mushrooms, oysters or creamed poultry. The word "patty" here is the older sense, from the French pâté — a small case holding a filling, not a flat cake of minced meat; the small tin called a "patty-pan" takes its name from the same word. Cayenne appears very commonly with melted cheese in period savouries, from Welsh rarebit to cheese straws, and it survives in the modern habit of a shake of hot sauce or mustard in a cheese sauce.