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Cheese Fondu
1 cup stale bread crumbs. 1 cup or 1/4 lb. cheese. (cut fine). 1 cup milk 2 eggs 1 tablespoon butter 1-21-81-8 teaspoon salt teaspoon mustard teaspoon paprika Mix bread, milk and cheese in a double boiler. When cheese is melted, add eggs, beaten until well mixed, add seasonings. Cook until thick and perfectly smooth. 1/2 teaspoon salt. 1/8 teaspoon mustard. 1/8 teaspoon paprika.
The same mixture may be prepared by placing bread and cheese in layers, in buttered pudding dish, and pouring over it milk, mixed with egg and seasoning, then baking till firm, in moderate oven 325°F. testing with knife, as for all custard mixtures. Dish should be set in pan of water to bake.
Macaroni, rice, or other cooked cereal may be substituted for bread crumbs. More or less cheese may be used. One egg will often be sufficient, or three may be preferred. Whites and yolks may be separated and whites stiffly beaten, folded in last. Then bake in buttered pudding dish.
An early-twentieth-century cheese fondu is a savoury cheese custard, not the Swiss melted-cheese pot. The method is forgiving, but the two versions given — stovetop in a double boiler and baked in a water bath — behave differently and want different handling.
- The hinge: keep the heat gentleThis is a custard carrying melted cheese, and cheese proteins tighten and weep well below boiling. Hold the double boiler water at a bare simmer and pull the mixture off the moment it coats a spoon; direct heat or a hard boil gives grainy curds in a thin pool of whey.
- Quantities the text does not fixBread and cheese are given no amounts in the ingredient line as printed, and the recipe itself invites you to vary them. For 1 cup milk and 2 eggs, roughly 1 cup soft breadcrumbs and 4 to 6 oz grated cheese is one workable reading.
- The seasoningsSalt, dry mustard and paprika are all fractional-teaspoon amounts in the original. A workable reading is 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1/8 teaspoon each mustard and paprika; the mustard is not optional flavouring, it sharpens the cheese and helps it emulsify.
- Cheese to useThe recipe does not specify a cheese; firm American 'store cheese', close to what we would call Cheddar, is a plausible period choice. Grate it rather than cubing it, and avoid pre-shredded bags, whose anti-caking starch can make the custard chalky.
- The baked versionThe stated 325°F is accurate for a custard and the water bath is not optional; it keeps the outside from setting into rubber before the centre is done. Expect 40 to 50 minutes in a shallow dish, and test with a knife an inch from the centre, which should come out clean with the middle still faintly trembling.
- Separated eggsThe variation with stiffly beaten whites folded in last produces something closer to a soufflé. Bake it as soon as it is assembled, still in the water bath, and serve it immediately — it will fall within a few minutes of leaving the oven.
- SubstitutionsCooked macaroni or rice in place of crumbs both work, but they absorb less milk than bread. Use a little less liquid, or the custard sets loose around the starch.
- YieldThis is a modest dish: two to three as a main course with a vegetable, or about four as a side. It is best eaten fresh; reheated leftovers tend to weep.
"Fondu" (or fondue) in American cookbooks of this era meant a baked or double-boiler cheese custard thickened with breadcrumbs, a usage that reaches back through nineteenth-century English and American manuals and only later ceded the word to the Swiss communal pot. Home economists and wartime food administrators were promoting cheese, eggs and milk as foods that could carry a meal without meat, and cheese dishes of exactly this kind filled the meatless-day pages of company-published cookery pamphlets. The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company distributed its cook book free to policyholders as part of a broader public-health campaign. The recipe spends more words on how much you may vary it than on what to put in, as though written for cooks working from what was in the house.