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Cheese Paste
This is made by pounding cheese in a mortar with a little butter, and adding wine, vinegar, pepper, and mustard according to taste, until it is of the consistency of stiff paste. It is then used as a relish with bread and butter or biscuits for luncheon, supper, etc. Cream cheese may be made into a paste by mixing it with a little flour and butter, and two or three eggs beaten with a little good cream. Time to prepare, about half an hour.
This is a potted-cheese relish, and the whole thing depends on pounding rather than crumbling: the cheese has to be worked until the fat and curd form a single smooth paste, or it stays grainy and refuses to hold the wine.
- Mortar work, done fasterA food processor does the pounding in a minute or two, but let the cheese come fully to room temperature first — cold cheese shatters into crumbs instead of creaming. Scrape down the bowl and run it longer than seems necessary; the paste should be glossy and take a swirl from a spatula.
- Which cheeseThe recipe names none. A firm, dry, well-aged English cheese of the Cheddar, Cheshire, Double Gloucester or Lancashire type suits the method best. Anything young and rubbery, or a pre-shredded mix cut with anti-caking starch, will not emulsify properly.
- ProportionsNone are given. A workable starting point is 8 oz grated cheese to 2 oz softened butter, with the liquid added a teaspoon at a time — a tablespoon of wine and a teaspoon of vinegar is plenty for that quantity. Too much liquid at once and the paste splits.
- "Wine" hereThe recipe says only wine. A fortified wine — sherry, Madeira or port — is the usual choice in savouries of this kind, and gives more flavour for the small amount of liquid the paste will take than a dry table wine.
- MustardPeriod recipes mean mustard powder mixed to a paste with a little water, or a sharp made mustard of the English type. Let mixed powder stand ten minutes before adding it, or the heat has not yet developed and you will overdose it.
- The cream cheese variantThe second sentence is a different thing altogether — cheese, flour, butter, eggs and cream is closer to a batter than a spread, and something of the sort would normally be cooked, though the text does not say so. As printed it gives no oven, no time and no instruction to cook it; do not eat that mixture unbaked, since it contains raw egg.
- Yield and keeping8 oz of cheese gives about a cup of paste, enough for six as a savoury with toast or plain biscuits. Packed into a small jar and sealed with a layer of clarified butter it keeps a week refrigerated; the flavour is better on the second day.
- Serving temperatureStraight from the refrigerator it is stiff and dull. Give it twenty minutes at room temperature before it goes to the table.
Potted cheese belongs to the same English household economy as potted meat and potted shrimps: a way of extending an expensive ingredient and of using up the hard, dry ends of a cheese that were too far gone to slice. Recipes of this kind appear in English cookery books from the eighteenth century onward, usually pounded in a mortar with butter and moistened with sherry or Madeira, and they survive today in the commercial pub "cheese spread" and in Welsh-border potted cheeses. It is offered as a method — a technique for turning any firm cheese into a relish — with quantities left to the cook's judgement, which is why the entry gives none. Its stated place at luncheon and supper reflects the Victorian habit of the savoury: something sharp and salty on bread or biscuit, taken at the informal end of the day when a full course would have been too much.</p>