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Cayenne (Soak crumbs in water fifteen)
Soak crumbs in water fifteen minutes. Prepare and measure all ingredients, as everything should be at hand before beginning to cook. Melt butter, add flour, and while cooking add cheese crumbled in small pieces. Cook and stir till smooth, and cheese is almost melted, then add milk gradually.
The soft bread-crumbs and seasoning come next.
When well blended, add the egg mixed with a tablespoonful cold water. Cook and stir carefully until slightly thickened, pour over hot crackers, and serve at once.
WHAT TO DO WITH SOUR MILK AND
This is a bread-thickened cheese rarebit, poured over hot crackers. The page as printed carries only the method — the ingredient quantities belonged to a list that has been cut off, so treat the amounts below as guidance rather than the book's own.
- The quantities are missingThe verbatim text gives no measures at all; the title fragment "Cayenne" appears to be the tail of an ingredient list that has been cut off. A workable rarebit of this type runs roughly a tablespoon each of butter and flour, a cup of grated cheese, half a cup of milk, half a cup of soft crumbs and one egg, but that is a reconstruction, not the original.
- Squeeze the crumbsSoft crumbs soaked fifteen minutes in water need to be pressed nearly dry before they go in, or the sauce turns slack and pasty. They are here as a thickener and a stretcher, doing the work a second spoonful of cheese would do.
- Cheese first, milk afterThe order is deliberate and unusual: the cheese goes into the hot roux before any liquid. Keep the heat low and the spoon moving, because a dry roux plus cheese will scorch quickly, and add the milk in a thin stream once the cheese has slumped.
- Which cheeseA period recipe calling simply for "cheese" most often points to a firm cheddar-type cheese, American or English. The recipe itself says to crumble it in small pieces; grating will melt faster if you prefer. Avoid pre-shredded cheese, whose anti-caking coating can make the sauce grainy.
- The egg is the hingeBeating it with a tablespoon of cold water is a tempering trick — the water slows the set. Add it off the direct heat, stir constantly, and stop as soon as the mixture coats the spoon. Held over heat it will scramble, and there is no rescuing it.
- Hot crackersThe crackers should be dried and warmed through in a low oven for a few minutes so they do not go soft on contact. Plain crackers of the common or soda type suit the dish; toast points work equally well.
- Cayenne and seasoningThe "seasoning" of the original almost certainly includes salt and, on the evidence of the title fragment, cayenne; dry mustard is common in rarebits of the period but is not indicated here. Cayenne in a rarebit is used with a light hand — a pinch or two for the whole panful, enough to sharpen the cheese rather than register as heat.
- Yield and timingOn the proportions above, enough for two as a supper dish or four as a savoury. It must be served the moment it thickens; reheating breaks the egg and the cheese separates.
Cheese melted with beer or milk and poured over toast is the old English Welsh rabbit, or rarebit, and by the late nineteenth century the American chafing-dish version had become standard supper-table fare. What suggests this may be a recipe with thrift in mind is the soaked bread-crumbs stirred into the sauce: the crumbs bulk out an expensive ingredient, and the crackers underneath use up whatever has gone stale in the tin. Books of this kind proliferated in the decades around 1900, when domestic economy was taught as a discipline and a cook was judged partly on how little went into the scrap pail. The trailing line at the foot of the page, "WHAT TO DO WITH SOUR MILK AND —", appears to announce the next chapter, and is a fair summary of the whole genre.