It had to happen eventually. When you’re working your way through a cookbook from another era, you run into a recipe that, while honest, is well, just not for you.
Up to this point in our slow exploration of the 1963 Good Housekeeping “Susan’s Section”, things had been going remarkably well. Susan’s cheese-and-rice soufflé turned out better than either of us expected. The scalloped potatoes were excellent. The baked macaroni and cheese had the sort of quiet, dependable comfort that reminds you why those recipes lasted for decades.
Susan, it seemed, knew what she was doing.
Then we met Baked Eggs in Cheese Sauce.
Now, on paper, the recipe sounds perfectly reasonable. Melt butter, stir in flour, add milk, and build a classic cheese sauce. Pour half of that into a baking dish, gently crack the eggs into the sauce, cover them with the rest, and bake the whole thing until the eggs set. Serve it on toast.
Simple. Economical. Practical.
Very Susan.
And to be fair, the recipe itself works exactly as written. The sauce thickens properly. The eggs bake through without breaking. The casserole emerges from the oven looking exactly like the picture mid-century home economists probably imagined when they tested it.
Technically speaking, everything about it behaved.
The problem arrives when you take the first bite.
What you have made is essentially eggs swimming in cheddar béchamel. It’s rich, but strangely muted. Creamy, but not particularly flavorful. The sauce, made from flour, milk, and processed cheddar, wraps around the eggs in a thick, comforting blanket that somehow manages to taste both heavy and bland at once.
My wife and I both looked at each other after the first few bites in that polite way people do when they’re trying to decide whether the problem is the recipe or their expectations.
It wasn’t the execution. The dish did exactly what Susan said it would do.
We just didn’t enjoy it.
And that moment, oddly enough, may be the most interesting one in the entire series so far.
Because cooking through an old cookbook isn’t just about rediscovering forgotten gems. It’s also about encountering the taste of another time. Mid-century American cooking leaned heavily on sauces like this one because they stretched inexpensive ingredients and made simple dishes feel more substantial. Flour-thickened milk sauces appeared everywhere, over vegetables, over fish, over toast, and apparently over eggs.
From a 1963 perspective, this dish checked all the right boxes. It was economical. It fed several people from a handful of ingredients. It could be assembled quickly and baked all at once, rather than frying eggs one by one on the stove.
But from a modern palate, the result feels like something is missing. A sharper cheese, perhaps. Bacon. Herbs. Something acidic to cut through the richness. Without those things, the dish lands with a kind of culinary shrug.
And that’s okay.
In fact, it’s valuable.
Because if every recipe from the past turned out to be brilliant, nostalgia would be doing the judging. Instead, what we get is something better: a clearer picture of how people actually cooked and ate sixty years ago.
Sometimes that history tastes wonderful.
Sometimes it tastes like Baked Eggs in Cheese Sauce.
This week, Susan lost a round.
But that’s part of the experiment.
Recipe: Baked Eggs in Cheese Sauce
From the 1963 Good Housekeeping “Susan’s Section”
Ingredients
3 tablespoons butter or margarine
3 tablespoons flour
Dash pepper
¾ teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon prepared mustard
1½ cups milk
1 cup grated process Cheddar cheese (¼ pound)
6 eggs
Instructions
Melt butter in a double boiler. Stir in flour, pepper, salt, and mustard.
Add milk and cook, stirring constantly, until smooth and thickened.
Add cheese and stir until melted.
Heat oven to 325°F.
Pour half the cheese sauce into a greased 10 × 6 × 2-inch baking dish.
Break eggs one at a time into a cup, then slide them into the sauce, side by side.
Cover with the remaining cheese sauce.
Bake uncovered 20–25 minutes, until eggs are done to taste.
Serve from the dish or on toast.
Makes 6 servings.