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Cheese Toast
Dry slightly in the oven and then toast as many slices of Boston brown bread as needed.
Butter and keep them warm. Make enough white sauce No. 2 (see page 68) to well cover the toast, using paprika instead of pepper. When the sauce bubbles add one-half cup grated cheese to each cup of sauce, remove from the fire at once, and pour over the toast. Serve very hot.
A cheese sauce over toasted brown bread — the sort of supper dish that turned stale loaf ends into a hot meal. Two things carry it: the sauce base and the moment the cheese goes in.
- The hinge: cheese off the heatThe cheese is stirred into the bubbling sauce and the pan comes off the fire immediately. Cheese held over heat in a flour-thickened sauce breaks and turns stringy or grainy; residual heat is enough to melt it smoothly.
- White sauce No. 2The referenced page is a white sauce; in books of this period a No. 2 is usually the medium grade — on the order of 2 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons flour cooked together, then 1 cup milk whisked in and simmered until it thickens and no longer tastes of raw flour. Several older books graded white sauces by thickness, though the numbering was not standard from author to author.
- QuantitiesHalf a cup grated cheese per cup of sauce is the working ratio. The recipe leaves the rest to the cook: as many slices as needed, and enough sauce to well cover them.
- Boston brown breadA steamed, molasses-sweetened rye-and-cornmeal loaf, usually cooked in a cylindrical tin or can. It is dense and moist, which is why the recipe dries it in the oven before toasting; no temperature is given, only 'dry slightly', until the surface firms. Untoasted, it goes soggy under the sauce at once.
- Cheese to usePeriod recipes assumed a firm American or dairy cheese. Grated fine, cheddar melts quickly and gives the flavour the sweet brown bread needs; pre-shredded bagged cheese carries anti-caking starch and can thicken the sauce oddly.
- Paprika, not pepperThe substitution is usually explained as being for colour as much as flavour, dark specks showing up on a pale sauce. Use sweet paprika, about a quarter teaspoon per cup, and salt the sauce properly, since brown bread is sweet and will flatten an underseasoned topping.
- ServingAssemble at the last minute and serve on warmed plates. The sauce sets and skins quickly, and reheating it undoes the smooth emulsion.
Cookery of this kind belongs to the American domestic-science movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when household writers treated thrift as a technical discipline: a loaf was not waste but raw material, and the standard white sauce was the all-purpose solvent for anything that needed reviving. Cheese on toast under a sauce sits in the same family as Welsh rabbit, though this version substitutes a milk-and-flour base for the ale or beer of the older English dish. The choice of Boston brown bread is regional and practical: the steamed loaf was a New England Saturday-night staple served with baked beans, and by Monday there were always ends of it left, too dense to eat plain and too good to throw out.