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Fried Cheese Sandwich
Cut slices of white bread round with biscuit cutter; spread with paste made with half a cupful of fresh American cheese, mashed smooth with a little cream.
Season with salt and paprika. Put slices together and together a fry a light brown in the blazer, in which a tablespoonful of butter has been melted. Serve hot.
An early griddled cheese sandwich, written for the chafing dish rather than the stove. Two details need translating: the pan and the cheese.
- The blazerThe blazer is the shallow upper pan of a chafing dish, set directly over the flame without its water bath. A small skillet over medium heat does the same job.
- American cheeseIn 1909 this meant plain factory cheddar, not the processed slices sold under the name today. Use a mild young cheddar or a Colby; both mash smooth and melt without separating.
- "Fresh" cheeseFresh here most likely means newly made and still soft-textured, which would explain why it can be mashed with cream into a paste; it may also mean no more than sound and not rancid. A well-aged cheddar will crumble instead; grate it fine and work in the cream a little at a time if that is all you have.
- QuantityHalf a cup of mashed cheese fills roughly four to six rounds cut from standard sliced bread, depending on cutter size. Scale up freely.
- Cutting roundsCut the rounds before filling, not after, or the paste squeezes out at the edge. The trimmings are worth keeping for crumbs.
- Heat and butterA tablespoon of butter in the pan will brown well before the cheese inside has melted if the heat is high. Keep it at medium, press the sandwich lightly, and allow two to three minutes a side; add a little more butter when you turn them.
- PaprikaPaprika of the period was generally mild rather than hot, used for colour and warmth. Sweet paprika, not hot or smoked, matches the intent.
- ServingThese collapse and toughen as they cool, so they are meant to leave the pan and go straight to the plate, which suits cooking in the blazer at table.
Eva Greene Fuller's Up-To-Date Sandwich Book belongs to a brief American vogue for the sandwich as a chafing-dish and afternoon-tea food rather than a lunch-pail staple, and it shows in the instructions here: bread cut into neat rounds with a biscuit cutter, filling thinned with cream to a spreadable paste, the whole thing browned at the table in the blazer. The chafing dish was fashionable equipment in middle-class households around the turn of the century, sold as a way for a hostess to cook in company without a servant, and cookbooks of the period carried whole chapters written for it. The dish itself is an ancestor of the grilled cheese sandwich, which is generally traced to the spread of cheap sliced bread and processed cheese in the 1920s and 1930s; this earlier version, buttered in the pan rather than on the bread and cut to a canape-sized circle, was aimed at the tea table rather than the diner counter.