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Cheese Balls (Cups grated cheese tablespoon)
1½ cups grated cheese. 1 tablespoon flour. ⅓ teaspoon salt. 1/8 teaspoon mustard.
Few grains cayenne.
Whites 3 eggs beaten stiff.
PROCESS: Add flour and seasonings to cheese, fold in whites of eggs, shape in small balls. Roll in fine cracker crumbs and fry a golden brown in deep hot Cottolene. Drain on brown paper.
A simple fried cheese fritter, bound with nothing but egg white and a spoonful of flour. The batter is fragile by design, so the handling matters more than anything else here.
- CottoleneA brand of shortening made from cottonseed oil blended with beef fat, sold by the N. K. Fairbank Company, which published this book. Any neutral frying oil or vegetable shortening does the same job at the same temperatures.
- Fry temperature"Deep hot" fat for a coated, quick-cooking item means about 375F. Cooler and the balls drink oil and slump; hotter and the crumb coating colors before the cheese inside has melted.
- The saltAs printed, 1½ teaspoons of salt for 1½ cups of grated cheese is very high, particularly with a salty aged cheese. The neighboring measurements suggest a compositor's slip for ½ teaspoon; season to taste rather than trusting the figure.
- The cheese"Grated cheese" in an American book of this date most often means a firm aged cheddar-type, grated fine. Use the fine holes of a box grater; coarse shreds make the mixture harder to bring together into a ball.
- Folding and shapingThis is the hinge. Fold the stiff whites in with as few strokes as will combine them, then shape and fry promptly; the mixture deflates on standing and the balls will spread in the fat.
- Cracker crumbsFine crumbs from plain soda crackers, rolled or pulsed to something between sand and breadcrumbs. Coat the balls completely, since any bare patch is where the cheese escapes.
- DrainingBrown paper means grocery-bag paper. Use a rack set over a tray, or paper towels; drain, salt if needed, and serve at once, as they toughen as they cool.
52 Sunday Dinners was compiled by Elizabeth O. Hiller and issued by the N. K. Fairbank Company, the Chicago firm that made Cottolene — which is why a cottonseed shortening is named as the frying medium here and throughout the book. Cottolene was marketed hard from the 1890s onward as a cleaner, cheaper substitute for lard, and promotional cookbooks like this one were one vehicle for the argument. The dish itself belongs to a large family of fried cheese "balls," "straws" and "fondus" that ran through American and English cookery of the period, where a savory course was a common feature of a formal dinner, and where beaten egg white was a familiar way to lighten a mixture that would otherwise fry heavy.