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Cheese Fondue
Beat five eggs without separating. When light, add one cupful of grated Swiss or mild American cheese, onehalf of a teaspoonful of salt, one-quarter of a teaspoonful of white pepper and three tablespoonfuls of butter; cut into bits. Cook in a double boiler or oven hot, until the cheese has melted and the mixture is smooth and as thick as custard. Pour over hot buttered toast and send at once to the table.
This is not the pot of melted cheese and wine that the word suggests today; it is a soft egg-and-cheese custard, closer to a rich scramble, spooned over toast. Everything depends on gentle heat.
- The hinge: low, slow heatThe eggs must thicken, not scramble. Keep the water in the lower pan at a bare simmer and stir constantly; pull the pan the moment the mixture coats a spoon, since it will keep setting off the heat. Direct heat will curdle it into cheesy lumps in seconds.
- "Or oven hot"The printed phrase reads oddly and may be intended to allow baking instead of the double boiler. The book gives no oven temperature here, so if you bake it, set the dish in a pan of hot water in a moderate oven and watch it closely; the double boiler is easier to judge.
- Mild American cheeseAt the time this meant a young, mild factory Cheddar, not the processed slices of later decades. Use a mild Cheddar or a Gruyere-style Swiss. Aged, dry cheeses break and turn oily in an egg custard.
- Grated, and packed looselyA cupful of grated cheese is roughly 3 to 4 oz depending on how fine the grate. Grate it finely so it melts before the eggs overcook.
- Three tablespoons of butterThat is a generous amount for five eggs and gives the dish its richness. Cutting it into bits, as directed, lets it melt evenly rather than pooling; it can be reduced to two tablespoons without harm.
- White pepperLikely specified so no dark flecks show in a pale dish. Black pepper will do if appearance does not matter, though the flavour is not quite identical.
- Yield and timingFive eggs serves three to four over toast. Expect eight to twelve minutes in a double boiler, and have the toast buttered and waiting, since the mixture stiffens and weeps if it stands.
Fondue comes from the French fondre, to melt, and through the nineteenth century English and American cookbooks used it for almost any hot dish of melted cheese bound with eggs, bread or milk. A comparable preparation is the cheese-and-egg dish set down by Brillat-Savarin in The Physiology of Taste (1825), which is essentially eggs beaten with grated Gruyere and butter and cooked until creamy; he insisted, as this book does, that it be sent to the table at once. The Swiss communal pot of wine and cheese that now owns the word did not become widely familiar to English-speaking cooks until well into the twentieth century. Its appearance in a chapter of cheese dishes reflects the period's view of cheese as a supper or luncheon protein rather than a course of its own.