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Cheese Fingers
Mix one Cream Cheese with an equal quantity of finely chopped English walnut meats; season with salt, black pepper and a few grains cayenne. Moisten with Cream Salad Dressing. Spread between thin slices of white bread and cut in strips the width of fingers.
A tea sandwich rather than a hot dish, and one that depends entirely on the bread being cut thin and the filling being spreadable. Two things in the original need translating: what "Cream Cheese" meant in 1913, and what "Cream Salad Dressing" refers to.
- Cream cheese, then and nowBy 1913 this meant a soft fresh cheese sold in small foil-wrapped blocks, close to what is on the shelf today but softer and less gummy, since modern cream cheese carries stabilising gums. Let a block come fully to room temperature before mixing or it will tear the bread.
- Cream Salad DressingA cross-reference to another recipe in the book, not bottled dressing. In period cookery such a dressing is usually a cooked one thickened with egg and flour, sharpened with vinegar or lemon and let down with cream. A spoonful or two of good mayonnaise thinned with cream gives much the same effect; you want just enough to loosen the paste, not to make it wet.
- English walnutThe ordinary tan-skinned walnut, Juglans regia, as distinct from the stronger, oilier American black walnut. Toast them lightly and cool them before chopping; untoasted walnut in a bland filling tastes flat.
- Equal quantityMost likely by volume rather than weight. An 8 oz block of cream cheese takes roughly a cup of chopped nuts, which makes a stiff, sandy paste rather than a smooth spread, which is why the dressing is needed.
- The breadA close-grained white sandwich loaf, a day old, cuts far more cleanly than fresh. Butter the slices thinly to the edges before spreading; the butter seals the crumb and keeps the dressing from soaking through.
- CuttingTrim the crusts after assembling, not before, then cut into three or four fingers per sandwich. A long thin-bladed knife wiped between cuts prevents dragging the filling out at the edges.
- Yield and holdingOne 8 oz block fills six to eight sandwiches, so roughly eighteen to thirty-two fingers. Made an hour or two ahead and kept covered with a damp cloth in the refrigerator, they hold well; beyond about half a day the bread goes leathery at the cut faces.
52 Sunday Dinners belongs to a genre of early twentieth-century American cookbooks organised as complete menus, week by week, so that a housekeeper could hand the day's plan to a cook or work through it herself; it is generally credited to Elizabeth O. Hiller and was issued in connection with a shortening manufacturer, which is why several of its recipes read like promotional demonstrations. Cheese fingers are the sort of thing served as an accompaniment with salad or soup, or at a tea table alongside the sweets. The combination of soft fresh cheese and walnuts seems to have been common enough in the period, cheap, keeping well, and requiring no cooking at a time when the sandwich loaf and commercially wrapped cream cheese were both newly convenient. The cut is the point: "fingers" meant a narrow strip meant to be eaten in two bites without a plate, part of the same fashion for small trimmed sandwiches that gave us the pinwheel and the ribbon sandwich.