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Cheese Balls (Rub to a paste one roll)
Rub to a paste one roll Neufchatel cheese; to this add one-half cup chopped pecan meats and one-half teaspoon finely chopped, mild red pepper; season with salt and roll with the "butter paddles" in small balls the size of Queen olives. Serve with berry or cherry pies.
A three-ingredient cheese ball meant as a sweet-course accompaniment rather than an appetizer. Nothing here is cooked, so the only real work is getting the paste smooth and cold enough to shape.
- The roll of NeufchatelAmerican Neufchatel was sold in small foil-wrapped rolls in this period, probably in the region of 3 ounces, so something under half of a modern 8-ounce brick. American Neufchatel is a soft fresh cheese close to cream cheese with a little less fat, not the bloomy-rind French Neufchâtel, which will not rub to a paste the same way.
- "Mild red pepper"This means a sweet fresh red pepper or a jarred pimiento, not cayenne or chile flakes. Half a teaspoon of a hot pepper would overwhelm three ounces of cheese and fight the fruit pie the balls are meant to accompany.
- Butter paddlesRidged wooden butter hands, scalded and then soaked in ice water before use so the cheese does not stick. Two small wooden spatulas work, or simply roll the balls between your palms with lightly dampened hands.
- Chill before shapingFresh cheese at room temperature will smear rather than form. Mix, then refrigerate 30 minutes until firm enough to hold a shape, and chill the finished balls again before serving.
- Size and yieldA Queen olive is about three quarters of an inch across.
- ServingThe recipe directs that these be served with berry or cherry pies, so they belong with the sweet course rather than as an appetizer. Season the salt lightly for that reason.
- PecansChop them fine rather than coarse, and toast them first if you like; the recipe assumes raw pecan meats, which in a cold cheese paste can taste flat.
Neufchatel was one of the first soft cheeses manufactured on a commercial scale in the United States, made in Orange County, New York, from the 1870s onward as an imitation of the French cheese of the same name, and by 1900 it was widely sold in small foil rolls. Recipes like this one show what happened next: a factory cheese with no character of its own became a blank base for chopped nuts, pimientos and seasonings, the same logic that produced the cream-cheese-and-nut sandwich fillings of the same decade. The instruction to shape the balls with butter paddles is a reminder that this was a household that still handled its own butter, and the pairing with berry or cherry pie suggests that dinner might close with cheese and fruit together rather than separating them into courses. 52 Sunday Dinners was organized as a year of complete menus, so small items like this exist to fill out a particular Sunday's dessert rather than to stand alone.