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Cheese Sandwiches
Make plain cheese sandwiches, dusting the cheese with a little dry mustard. Cut in halves and fry in Mazola.
Three sentences with no quantities, no pan temperature and no cheese named — this is a sketch rather than a recipe, and it assumes a cook who already knows what a sandwich fried in oil should look like.
- The hinge: shallow fry, not butter-griddleThis is not the modern grilled cheese. The sandwich goes into a film of hot oil in a skillet, so the crust comes out crisper and darker than a buttered griddle gives. Use enough oil to coat the pan, around 2 tablespoons for two sandwiches.
- MazolaStill sold, still corn oil. Any neutral oil with a high smoke point works identically; the brand name is here because this book was almost certainly produced to sell it.
- Pan heatMedium, roughly 350F. Too hot and the bread browns before the cheese slumps; too cool and the bread drinks the oil. Two to three minutes a side, pressing lightly with a spatula.
- The cheese"Plain cheese" here probably signals nothing more than an unadorned cheese sandwich. The cheese an American cook of this period would most likely have used was a firm yellow store cheese, close to what is now sold as mild or medium Cheddar. Slice it thin so it melts in the time the bread takes to colour.
- Dry mustardMustard powder, dusted directly on the cheese. It is assertive: about 1/8 teaspoon per sandwich is plenty, and heating tends to mellow its sharpness.
- Cut before fryingWhatever the reason, halving first has practical advantages: smaller pieces turn without the filling sliding out, and the cut edge crisps.
- YieldReckon one whole sandwich per person as a luncheon dish alongside soup or a salad; two if it is the centre of the meal.
Mazola corn oil is generally traced to the early 1910s, when the Corn Products Refining Company began marketing corn oil as a cooking fat to households that had previously used lard, butter or olive oil, and promotional cookbooks like this one existed to demonstrate that the new oil could do everything the old fats did. That commercial purpose explains the bare-bones instruction here: the reader was assumed to know how to build a cheese sandwich, and the point of the entry was simply that it could be fried in corn oil. Dry mustard with cheese is a long-standing English habit, familiar from Welsh rarebit and from cheese-on-toast recipes of the period.