[Yesterday, I re-posted a photo of Mom slicing her cheese bread. I told about the importance of cheese bread at our family holiday meals. Today, here’s a second re-post of the recipe.]
Five red Bow Ties o’ the Day are proud to provide a recipe we think you’ll find tasty. It’s cheesy and bready. Who could find fault with that?
Actually, I really can’t call this a “recipe.” Mom’s recipes ranged from easy-peasy to intricate and near-impossible. This is a simple one. Three ingredients are all you need. You’ll also need an oven.
1 loaf of French bread. 1 stick or 1/2 stick of butter. And one jar of Kraft Old English Spread.
Lay a sheet of foil across a cookie sheet. You do not want to have to clean baked-on cheese off your cookie sheet. Use the foil.
Hand-mix the cheese spread and butter together until it’s creamy. Mom generally uses the whole stick of butter, although I’ve seen her use just half a stick. I always use just the half.
With a bread knife, skin ALL the crust off the French bread. Ditch the crust.
Cover the bottom of the skinned loaf with the cheese/butter spread, then place it on the foil-covered cookie sheet. Continue to cover the sides and top of the loaf with the cheese/butter spread. Spread the spread as evenly as you can. Since the size of French bread loaves vary, you might or might not use the entire amount of spread. Plus, you’ll definitely want to experiment with how thick you like your cheese spread layer to be. If you want a thin layer of the cheese/butter mixture on the entire loaf, you’ll probably have enough to cover two loaves.
Bake for 10-ish minutes, at 350 degrees. Ovens vary, you know. Experiment with how crusty—if at all—you like the top of your cheese bread to be. The more you experiment with the variables, the more cheese bread you’ll “have to” eat.🤤
I recommend you slice the cheese bread (an electric knife works best) while it’s still hot. And put it on the table hot. But it’s still yummy when it has cooled off.
As any good cook knows, even with an easy recipe the taste is in the details. Mom’s excellent cooking was the result of tweaking good recipes to make them better, as well as her knack for timing. Still, she cooked primarily by sight, smell, and taste. Measuring ingredients wasn’t much of a concern to her. She guesstimated a lot. That’s what makes it difficult to pin down her actual recipes.
If someone wanted a recipe, she’d give them one. She’d also invite them to come to the house to watch her make what they were asking about. Her complicated candy-type creations are especially almost impossible to re-create, even if you watched her make it and tried to write everything down. She was always changing the way she did it or adding a new twist or a different ingredient. And, of course, exact measurements were not always Mom’s way.
Oh. About the potato chips and Diet Coke in the photo. Those food staples are for you to snack on while you make the cheese bread. Substitute a bottle of wine for the Diet Coke, if you are so inclined. Chocolate is also allowed.