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Cheese and Green Peppers
To soft cheese such as is packed in jars add desired amount of chopped green peppers. Use for sandwiches or serve from dish.
Cheese Soufflé ¼ cup white sauce No. 3 (see page 68) ½ teaspoonful salt 1 cup grated cheese 3 egg whites 3 egg yolks Dash of cayenne Make white sauce; while hot add cheese, salt, and cayenne, stirring as cheese melts. Remove from heat and add yolks of eggs already beaten until thick. Let cool, cut and fold in stiffly beaten whites of eggs, turn into buttered baking-dish holding a quart, and bake in moderate oven twenty to twenty-five minutes. Serve at once. 1½ cups milk
Two items run together here: a quick pepper-cheese spread, then a cheese soufflé built on a thick white sauce. Both assume a pantry vocabulary that has shifted.
- "Soft cheese such as is packed in jars"A soft spreadable cheese sold ready-potted rather than a cut cheese. Cream cheese or a fresh soft cheese at room temperature is a workable substitute; beat it smooth before folding in the peppers so the spread holds together on bread.
- Green peppersIn American cookery of this period a green pepper generally means a sweet bell pepper, not a chile. Chop fine and blot the pieces dry, or the moisture will loosen the spread.
- White sauce No. 3Numbered white sauces in books of this era generally run from thin to thick, so No. 3 is likely one of the thicker grades; the actual proportions are given on page 68 and should be taken from there. A thin sauce will not carry the eggs.
- The stray "1½ cups milk"A fragment carried over from a neighbouring recipe, not an ingredient of the soufflé. Do not add milk to the finished mixture.
- Moderate ovenConventionally read today as about 350F, though the book gives no temperature. Butter the quart dish and do not overfill it; check at twenty minutes.
- Cool before foldingThe hinge of the dish. If the cheese base is still hot when the whites go in, they deflate and the soufflé bakes flat and dense. Let it come down to lukewarm, then cut and fold rather than stir.
- Grated cheeseA firm Cheddar-type cheese is the usual reading. Grate it fine and add it off direct high heat so it melts into the sauce instead of stringing.
- Serve at onceMeant literally; a soufflé starts to sink soon after leaving the oven. A quart dish with three eggs makes a modest number of servings.
Left-over cookery of the early twentieth century leaned hard on the white sauce, which could carry scraps of cheese, fish or vegetable into something that looked deliberate at table. The soufflé appealed to household writers because it turned a cup of odds and ends into a dish with a French name and a certain amount of ceremony. The pepper-cheese spread beside it belongs to the same period's enthusiasm for jarred soft cheeses.