Bacon and Cheese with Toast (1915)
Reader ratingsBacon and cheese with toast, Anna Howard Shaw’s pick in The Suffrage Cook Book (1915): lean bacon under thick cheese, dusted with mustard and paprika, baked and served with dry toast.
- Recipe makes
- 4 servings
- Prep
- Cook
- Total
The bacon and cheese bake for 25 to 30 minutes at 350°F (180°C); toast the bread while it bakes.
Bacon baked under cheese with paprika, with dry toast.
The story behind the recipe
Anna Howard Shaw ended her 1915 letter to The Suffrage Cook Book with bacon baked under a blanket of cheese, after explaining why she was the wrong person to ask. It is printed among the meat dishes.
The president’s confession
Shaw led the National American Woman Suffrage Association from 1904 to 1915, the year the book came out. Born in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1847 and brought to Massachusetts at four, she was ordained in the Methodist Protestant Church and took a medical degree from Boston University in 1886. Cooking was not among her qualifications, as she was the first to admit. She had not “made an effort in the culinary line” in at least thirty years, she wrote, except one clam pie, “pronounced by my friends as very good,” whose method she had forgotten.
What she sent instead was a recipe she had “got out of the newspapers,” and she had never made it. It is a dish recommended entirely on trust, and the only recipe her letter gives, short enough to remember: bacon, cheese, mustard, paprika, a slow oven and dry toast on the side.
Read more about this recipe
Making it today
Shaw’s “one or two rashers” won’t feed many, so we use eight slices for four people, laid close together so the cheese covers them as one sheet. Sharp cheddar is our choice; the newspaper recipe says only cheese. Its slow oven took half an hour; we bake it at 350°F (175°C), where the bacon cooks through under the cheese in 25 to 30 minutes.
What Did the Suffragists Cook? quotes more of Shaw’s letter, the nail and the clam pie included, and follows the campaign that asked her for it. For something sweet from the same book, try the Pain d’Oeufs (1915) of Carrie Chapman Catt, who followed Shaw as the movement’s leader.
Spread one or two rashers of lean bacon on a baking tin, cover it thickly with slices of cheese, and sprinkle a little mustard and paprika over it. Bake it in a slow oven for half an hour and serve with slices of dry toast.
Recipe makes: 4 servings
Ingredients
For 4 servings. Quantities are shown as written.
Quantities as written here, for 4 servings.
- Lean bacon8 slicesAuthor measures: about 8 oz.
- Sharp cheddar, thinly sliced6 oz
- Dry mustard1/2 tsp
- Sweet paprika1/4 tsp
- White bread4 slices
Measurement notes
Ingredients as written here
- 8 slices lean bacon (about 8 oz)
- 6 oz sharp cheddar, thinly sliced
- 1/2 tsp dry mustard
- 1/4 tsp sweet paprika
- 4 slices white bread
Equipment
- Rimmed baking sheet, lined with parchment
- Toaster or broiler
Instructions
Heat the oven to 350°F (175°C) and line the baking sheet with parchment.
Lay the bacon on the parchment in a single layer, the slices touching, to make one rectangle.
Cover the bacon completely with the cheddar slices, overlapping them a little so no bacon shows.
Mix the dry mustard and paprika and sprinkle them evenly over the cheese.
Bake for 25 to 30 minutes, until the cheese is bubbling and browned at the edges and the bacon underneath is cooked through when you lift a corner: the fat opaque and lightly golden, with no soft, white, translucent fat left.
While it bakes, toast the bread and keep the slices dry, without butter.
Cut the bacon and cheese into one piece per serving with a spatula, leaving the fat behind on the parchment, and serve at once with the dry toast.
Nutrition
340calories per serving
- Recipe makes
- 4 servings
- Servings
- 4
Estimated per serving from USDA FoodData Central values for cooked bacon, cheddar cheese and white bread.
Recipe notes
When adjusting quantities
For a larger batch, use a second baking sheet; keep the bacon in a single layer.
Notes
Quantities mentioned in these notes don’t change when you adjust the servings.
Thick-cut bacon needs 5 to 10 minutes longer. Any firm melting cheese works; a mild one lets the mustard show more.
Scaling changes the ingredients only; pan sizes and cooking times need their own judgment. To adapt this recipe further, try the recipe tool at TuneMyRecipe (opens in a new tab), our sister site.
Sources and attribution
After Anna Howard Shaw’s letter in The Suffrage Cook Book, comp. Mrs. L. O. Kleber (Pittsburgh, 1915)
Recipe details
- Course
- Main course
- Dish family
- Meat & Poultry
- Region
- American
- Source decade
- 1910s
- Main ingredient
- Pork & ham
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Occasion
- Everyday meal