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Neufchatel Salad
Mash two rolls of Neufchatel cheese, add two table-spoonfuls of finely-chopped olives, moisten with cream, season with salt and cayenne, form into small balls. Serve on shredded lettuce and garnish with four red peppers cut into strips, and arranged in four piles in star shape. Probable cost, 1s. 6d.
A cheese-ball salad of the kind that filled the salad course in Edwardian households. It is barely a recipe and depends entirely on the cheese you buy.
- "Two rolls" of NeufchatelThe cheese was sold in small foil- or paper-wrapped cylinders; no weight is recorded here, so something in the region of 8 oz total is a reasonable working figure. American-style Neufchatel comes in 8 oz bricks and behaves the same way; French Neufchatel from Normandy is a bloomy-rind cheese with a far stronger, saltier flavour and will give a very different result.
- Which cheese to useIf you want the dish as intended, use the soft, mild, slightly lower-fat cream cheese sold as Neufchatel in the United States. If you use the rinded Normandy cheese, cut the rind away or the balls will not mash smooth.
- The red peppersThese are probably not chillies. In cookery writing of the period "red peppers" in a garnish often means sweet red capsicum or canned pimiento, and pimiento strips are the easiest modern equivalent. The cayenne is doing the heat.
- Cream, added sparinglyAdd it a teaspoon at a time. The mixture needs to be soft enough to blend the olives through but stiff enough to roll; too much cream and you have a spread that chilling will only partly firm up.
- Chill before rollingThe original does not say so, but half an hour in the refrigerator makes the balls hold their shape and lets the olive and cayenne flavour spread through the cheese. Roll with damp hands or two teaspoons.
- OlivesGreen olives in brine, stoned and chopped fine, are the likeliest reading; the recipe says only "olives". Blot them dry before chopping or the brine will loosen the cheese.
- DressingNone is given. A plain French dressing over the shredded lettuce, with the balls set on top, suits modern palates better than dry leaves.
- YieldAround eight ounces of cheese should make roughly a dozen small balls, enough for four as a salad course.
- The cost1s. 6d. is a shilling and sixpence, quoted so a cook could price a menu. It says the dish was a modest one, but the cream cheese and olives put it above everyday fare.
Neufchatel is one of the oldest of the Norman cheeses, made in the Pays de Bray and traditionally traced back to the medieval abbeys of the region, but the cheese called for here is most likely the American reinterpretation: a soft unripened cheese associated with Chester, New York, from the 1870s, sold in small foil-wrapped rolls and marketed alongside the cream cheese that grew out of the same trade. The dish is a fair specimen of the cold, decorative, assembled salad of the period. The insistence on arranging the pepper strips in four piles in a star shape is the real tell: at this date the salad course was judged as much on the look of the dish as on what was in it, and a competent cook was expected to build a pattern on the plate.