Cheese Soup
4 tablespoonfuls grated cheese. 3 quarts clear soup stock 1½ cupfuls flour 4 tablespoonfuls Crisco 2 cupfuls cream 2 eggs Salt, pepper, and paprika to taste Finely grated cheese Put flour into double boiler, add gradually cream, Crisco, 4 tablespoonfuls of grated cheese and paprika to taste, stir over fire till a smooth paste. Break in eggs, mix well, cook two minutes longer and allow to cool. Roll into balls, when they are all formed, drop into boiling water and cook gently five minutes. Drain and put into soup tureen. Pour over boiling stock and serve with dish of finely grated cheese.
This is a clear stock served over poached cheese dumplings, closer to a garnished consommé than to a creamy cheese soup. The dumpling paste is the whole job; the stock is simply brought to a boil and poured over.
- The paste must be stiffThe flour, cream, fat and cheese are cooked to a thick roux-paste that will hold a shape when cool — a panade, essentially. If it is loose enough to slump, the balls dissolve in the poaching water. Cook it until it pulls away from the sides of the pan in one mass, and chill it thoroughly before rolling. The flour figure has not come through cleanly in this printing; for 2 cupfuls of cream something in the region of 1½ cups gives a workable stiff paste, but treat the amount as approximate and add flour by feel until the mass is firm.
- CriscoCrisco is hydrogenated vegetable shortening, and the book exists to sell it. Butter is the obvious substitute here and improves the flavour of a cheese dumpling; an equal weight works.
- Double boilerThe paste is cooked over water to keep the cheese from catching and turning grainy. A heavy saucepan over low heat works if you stir constantly, but the double boiler is genuinely more forgiving with this much cheese.
- The eggsBeat the eggs in off the direct heat and work fast — dumped into a hot paste they scramble. Two minutes of further cooking is enough to set them into the mixture.
- PoachingThe recipe says to drop the balls into boiling water and then "cook gently". A hard rolling boil risks knocking them apart, so it is safer to slacken the water to a bare simmer once the balls are in. Five minutes suits small balls of roughly an inch; test one by cutting it open.
- CheeseNo variety is named. A dry, well-aged cheese that grates finely is the likely intention — aged Cheddar, Gruyère or Parmesan. Fresh mozzarella or anything soft will weep fat into the paste.
- YieldThree quarts of stock serves ten to twelve as a first course. The dumpling mixture makes roughly two to three dozen small balls; allow two or three per bowl.
- AssemblyDrain the dumplings well and pour the stock over at the table or immediately before serving. Left to sit in hot stock they swell and thicken it.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was published by Procter & Gamble to teach American cooks what to do with a wholly new product: hydrogenated cottonseed oil, sold as a shortening that neither smoked like butter nor carried the associations of lard. The recipes are conventional turn-of-the-century fare with Crisco substituted into every possible position, which is why shortening turns up in a cheese dumpling where butter would otherwise be the expected fat. The dumplings themselves are a familiar European garnish — a cooked flour paste enriched with cheese and bound with egg, poached and floated in clear broth, in the manner of the profiterole garnishes of nineteenth-century consomm he the the the the the