Stale Bread, A Block of Cheese...It's Suppertime! - Cheese Soup

Welcome to 18th Century Cooking. I'm your host, Jon Townsend. What do you do if you have a loaf of stale bread and a block of old cheese? Well, we're going to find out today. Thanks for joining us today as we savor the flavors and the aromas of the 18th century. So the recipe for today is out of Ann Cook's 1760 cookbook, Professed Cookery. Super simple recipe. It's called To Make a Cheshire Cheese Soup. Put a crumb of a penny loaf into three pints of water. Boil it. Grate half a pound of old cheshire and put it into the bread and boil it. Super simple recipe, right? It's only got water. It's got bread. It's got cheese. But it's one of these recipes that could be, not necessarily, you know, her reference here, but it could be one of those recipes that it's like, okay, how do I get rid of these things? It's a very efficient recipe. The crumb of a penny loaf, that can be stale bread. Bread that's gone bad. You pare it off the bad parts, keep the good parts, and you're using just crumb, right? And then the cheese. She calls for an old cheshire cheese. An old cheshire cheese. Cheshire cheese was one of those long-lived cheese in the time period. It's one of those kind of hard cheeses they would leave around and they would actually age it. And cheese here is a, it's a food preservation technique. What happens when you have a lot of milk, you make cheese. So cheese is a great item when you want something milk-based, and maybe cows aren't giving milk at that time. Or you've had milk that was prolific at one part of the time of the year, and you need food later on. And so this cheese is the perfect preservation method. Both of these things go together, make a very efficient food source. So we're going to start up with three pints of boiling water. That isn't a ton of water. It'll come up to boil pretty quickly. And you can put your bread crumbs in, or that crumb of a penny loaf. These pieces are pretty big. You might want to chop those up very, very fine. It'll break down a little bit faster. You can use panko or other bread crumbs. I like using actual bread though, because it just seems better to me. The crumb of a penny loaf, in the recipe, we're not sure that the penny loaf kind of changes in size. But it's not a big loaf of bread. Six, maybe eight ounces. Something like that would be a good place to start with the amount of bread crumb. After your bread is boiled a little while, it's broken down a bit and kind of smoothed out. Now it's time to bring in that cheese. You want eight ounces of cheese. The recipe calls for old Cheshire. Now, that's almost impossible to come up with here in North America. So you can use some other cheeses. You could use a Parmesan cheese. You could use, I mean, basically any cheese you've got around the house. You don't want to use a stringy cheese like mozzarella. So here I'm using a cheddar. That's going to turn out great. Again, I chopped up this cheese into bits. You can grate it. In fact, it calls for grating the cheese, so that it mixes in and breaks down and gets smooth very quickly as it goes into this boiling water. Once it's back up to boiling, it's basically done. You don't really need to keep going unless you want it to smooth out. Don't let this boil too long. If you do, make sure to keep stirring it. You don't want it to stick to the bottom and kind of, you know, build up a thick layer. Now it's basically ready to come off the fire and pour into those bowls, let it cool down a little bit. We added a little bit of spring greens. We've got some wild garlic growing right outside. So I thought this would be perfect just to sprinkle up on top of it as a garnish. And traditionally in soup dishes in this time period, a little toasted sippet. Sometimes you'll put a piece of toast in the bottom and pour your soup on top or you'll stick little sippets in like this. So we've got some sippets. Let's find out just how this tasted. Now it's smoothed right out. Wonderful texture. Wonderful. Got a great cheesy flavor. This particular cheese has just enough salt in with it. So it tastes great that way. It might add a little pepper just for the fun of it. Because I enjoy pepper. Let's find out what it's like with one of these little sippets. So, so very good. And the smell is great. It'll fill your kitchen with a wonderful smell. A great way to use stale bread or, you know, not stale bread for that matter. And cheese, a very filling meal and just tremendously easy to do. Very simple, just ingredients you've got right around the house. If you're interested in cheese making from the time period, to check out this cheese making video that we shot at Genesee Country Village.