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Parmesan Sandwich
Finely grated Parmesan cheese, a dash of salt and pepper, one tablespoonful of tomato catsup, mix and place between squares of unsweetened cracker.
Put crackers on a thin plate, set in hot oven for three minutes or until the cheese melts and the cracker becomes crisp. Serve hot.
A three-minute cracker canapé with almost no measurements attached. The only quantity given is the tablespoon of catsup, so treat the cheese as whatever makes a spreadable paste with it.
- ProportionsAbout 1/4 cup finely grated Parmesan to the tablespoon of catsup gives a thick, spreadable paste. Any looser and it runs off the cracker in the oven.
- "Hot oven"In period usage this is somewhere around 400-450F. Three minutes at that heat should melt the cheese without scorching the cracker edges.
- Unsweetened crackerA plain soda cracker or water biscuit; sweet crackers and biscuits were also sold, which may be why the recipe specifies unsweetened. Saltines work; so do thin water crackers, which crisp faster.
- The thin plateThe recipe gives no reason for specifying a thin plate. Use a baking sheet, and line it, since melted Parmesan sticks hard.
- Catsup of 1909Tomato catsup then was thinner, sharper and more heavily spiced with clove and allspice than modern ketchup. Modern ketchup is sweeter, so cut it with a few drops of vinegar if the result tastes candied.
- ParmesanGrate a wedge of Parmigiano-Reggiano or Grana Padano yourself for a far better melt; modern pre-grated cheese is coated to keep it loose.
- Watch themThree minutes is not a suggestion. Parmesan is low-moisture and goes from melted to grainy and bitter quickly at 450F; pull them the moment the surface glosses over.
- Yield and servingThe stated quantity of paste covers roughly eight to ten crackers — one round of hot canapés for four. They must be eaten immediately, as they soften within minutes of cooling.
Eva Greene Fuller's Up-to-Date Sandwich Book collected several hundred variations at a moment when the sandwich had shifted from a working lunch to a fixture of afternoon teas, card parties and chafing-dish suppers. The cheese section reflects that: these are not lunch sandwiches but hot savouries, closer to the English idea of a cheese course served at the end of a meal than to anything eaten between slices of bread. The pairing of grated hard cheese with bottled tomato catsup is very much of its decade — commercially bottled catsup was by then a pantry staple in American households, valued as a ready-made seasoning that supplied acidity, salt and spice in one spoonful. Recipes of the period lean on it the way a modern cook leans on Worcestershire or Dijon.