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Cheese Sauce
Add one-half cup of grated cheese to one cup of white sauce No. 2. Use paprika instead of pepper in making the sauce.
A two-line recipe that assumes you have the book's numbered white sauce table in front of you. The only real work is knowing what No. 2 was and keeping the cheese from breaking.
- White sauce No. 2Numbered white sauces in American cookbooks of this period generally run from thin to thick, with No. 2 the medium one; a medium sauce is typically about 2 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons flour to 1 cup milk, with a thin sauce using roughly 1 tablespoon of each and a thick one 3 or 4. Check the book's own table for its figures.
- Add the cheese off the heatThis is the hinge. Take the finished sauce off the burner, then stir in the cheese until it melts. Held over direct heat, the proteins tighten and the fat separates into greasy threads.
- Which cheeseGrated cheese in books of this period would most often have been a dry aged Cheddar or an American factory cheese, sometimes Parmesan. A well-aged Cheddar melts smoothly; pre-shredded bagged cheese carries anti-caking starch that can make the sauce grainy.
- QuantityHalf a cup grated is roughly 2 oz by weight, which is a moderate hand. Doubling it gives a sauce heavy enough to gratin under a broiler but stiff once it cools.
- The paprikaPaprika here is for colour as much as heat, keeping the sauce pale gold rather than freckled with black pepper. Use sweet Hungarian or Spanish paprika; hot or smoked varieties will dominate.
- Cook the flour firstLet the butter and flour bubble together a minute or two before the milk goes in, or the sauce tastes of raw starch. It should not colour.
- Yield and useAbout one and a quarter cups, enough to sauce roughly two cups of diced cooked chicken or turkey for four. Reheat gently over low heat or in a double boiler, thinning with a spoonful of milk.
Numbered white sauces are a hallmark of the American domestic-science movement, which came out of the Boston Cooking School and its imitators around the turn of the twentieth century and treated cookery as a subject with formulas to be memorised rather than dishes to be learned by feel. A book of left-overs depended on that system entirely: once a cook knew the standard proportions of butter, flour and milk, a whole chapter of made-over dishes could be written in a sentence or two, as this one is. Cheese sauce over yesterday's fowl belongs to the same thrift culture that produced croquettes, timbales and scalloped everything, all of them ways of putting a second dinner on the table without the household admitting it was eating leftovers.