Home › January › Cheese and Pimento Salad (Mix two cream cheeses)
Cheese and Pimento Salad (Mix two cream cheeses)
Mix two cream cheeses with one-half cup finely chopped pimentos. (Drain pimentos from liquor in can, and dry them on crash towel.) Add one tablespoon finely chopped chives or onion, onehalf teaspoon finely chopped parsley, season with salt and cayenne. Moisten with thick cream, and pack solidly in prepared green peppercups. Set aside in a cold place for several hours. With a sharp knife cut in thin slices crosswise. Arrange two slices on crisp lettuce leaves; serve with French Dressing. 6 sweet Florida oranges. 1 cocoanut grated.
A stuffed-pepper icebox salad of the sort that filled the salad chapter of every American cookbook between about 1900 and 1930. It is straightforward, but two things in the text need translating and one line does not belong to the recipe at all.
- "Two cream cheeses"Cream cheese was sold in small foil-wrapped cakes, commonly around three ounces each, so this probably means roughly six ounces total, a little short of one standard modern 8-ounce brick. Use full-fat block cheese, not whipped or spreadable, or the roll will not hold a slice.
- PimentosCanned pimentos are still sold in jars near the olives. Draining and blotting them is not fussiness: the packing liquid will loosen the cheese enough that it slumps rather than slices.
- Crash towelCrash was a coarse plain-woven linen used for kitchen towels. Any lint-free tea towel or a few thicknesses of paper towel does the same job.
- Prepared green pepper cupsThe period term for bell peppers cored, seeded and with the ribs cut away, so the cavity is a clean cylinder. Choose narrow, straight-sided peppers; a squat one gives slices too wide for a lettuce leaf.
- Pack solidlyThis is the hinge. Any air pocket becomes a hole in the finished slice, so press the cheese in with the back of a spoon a little at a time and tap the pepper down on the counter as you go.
- Moisten with thick creamThick cream here means heavy cream, added a teaspoon at a time. Add only enough to make the mixture workable — too much and it will never firm up in the refrigerator.
- Chilling and slicing"Several hours" in a period icebox is comfortably matched by four hours in a modern refrigerator, or overnight. Slice with a thin knife wiped clean between cuts, about a quarter inch thick.
- The last two lines"6 sweet Florida oranges. 1 cocoanut grated." is not part of this salad. Sweet oranges and grated coconut are the standard makings of an ambrosia, and the line has most likely been carried in from a neighbouring recipe on the page. Ignore it here.
- YieldThe recipe does not say how many peppers to fill; six ounces of cheese will stuff a couple of small ones, and each yields enough thin slices for two or three plates at two slices each. French dressing in this period means plain oil, vinegar, salt and pepper, beaten thin, not the sweet orange bottled kind.
Cream cheese stuffed into a hollowed pepper, chilled and cut in pinwheels was one of the signature tricks of the American "salad course" era, when a salad was expected to arrive at the table with a shape rather than tossed in a bowl. The technique depended on two things that were new to home kitchens around 1900: reliably packaged fresh cream cheese, sold in small cakes and shipped chilled, and canned pimentos, which turned a Spanish sweet pepper into a year-round pantry staple prized as much for its color as its flavor. Books like this one leaned hard on such made-ahead cold dishes, which could be built in advance and sliced at the last moment.