The Complete Book of Cheese by Robert Carlton Brown
page 68 of 464 (14%)
page 68 of 464 (14%)
![]() | ![]() |
|
small cups to crowd into the bottom of your double boiler or chafing
dish. But beyond this we plump for a revival of the "cheese stewer" in stainless steel, silver or glass. In the ritual at "The Cheese," these dishes, brimming over, "bubbling and blistering with the stew," followed a pudding that's still famous. Although down the centuries the recipe has been kept secret, the identifiable ingredients have been itemized as follows: "Tender steak, savory oyster, seductive kidney, fascinating lark, rich gravy, ardent pepper and delicate paste"--not to mention mushrooms. And after the second or third helping of pudding, with a pint of stout, bitter, or the mildest and mellowest brown October Ale in a dented pewter pot, "the stewed Cheshire cheese." Cheese was the one and only other course prescribed by tradition and appetite from the time when Charles II aled and regaled Nell Gwyn at "The Cheese," where Shakespeare is said to have sampled this "kind of a glorified Welsh Rarebit, served piping hot in the square shallow tins in which it is cooked and garnished with sippets of delicately colored toast." Among early records is this report of Addison's in _The Spectator_ of September 25,1711: They yawn for a Cheshire cheese, and begin about midnight, when the whole company is disposed to be drowsy. He that yawns widest, and at the same time so naturally as to produce the most yawns amongst his spectators, carries home the cheese. Only a short time later, in 1725, the proprietor of Simpson's in the |
|