Margaret Fielding
CHEESE PASTE-FIELDING
To one-quarter cup of English walnuts, chopped very fine, add a cake of cream cheese.
Mix well and let stand so as to soften. Then chop as finely as possible one-half of a green pepper and two small or one large tender stalks of celery, and mix with the cheese.
Melt about a quarter cup of butter, add this also, with one-fifth of a pound of Roquefort cheese, the juice of one onion and paprika sufficient to color it pinkish.
After the whole is thoroughly mixed, let stand to cool and serve.
Mery aset Fielding
ASPARAGUS HOLLANDAISE
Cut off stalks as far down as brittle, scrape and clean thoroughly. Tie in bunches and boil in salted water until tender-about half an hour. Lift carefully on to platter, remove string and pour over tops the Hollandaise sauce, made as follows: 1/2 cup butter 1 tablespoon lemon juice Yolks of two eggs Pinch of salt Dash of paprika 1/2 cup boiling water One-third of the butter in a saucepan with yolks of eggs and lemon juice. Place saucepan in a larger one containing boiling water and stir with a wire whisk. Add second piece of butter and, as it thickens, third piece. Add water, cook one minute and season.
If you are as fond of this dish as I am you will use the canned asparagus when the fresh is out of season. Truly yours,
Two dishes under one name: a cold cheese spread and asparagus with hollandaise. Both are workable today, though the asparagus timing belongs firmly to its period.
- Boil the asparagus for minutes, not half an hourThirty minutes in salted water leaves modern asparagus grey and collapsing. Trimmed spears need 3-5 minutes in boiling salted water, a little longer for very thick ones. The recipe only tells you to tie the spears in bunches and boil them; the tie makes them easy to lift out whole and to unstring on the platter, as written.
- A cake of cream cheeseThe small foil-wrapped cake usually sold in this period was around 3 ounces. Modern bars are 8 ounces, so use roughly a third of a block for the proportions given here.
- One-fifth of a pound of RoquefortThat is 3.2 ounces, roughly 90 g. Weigh it rather than eyeball it, since Roquefort dominates the paste quickly, and use real Roquefort or another sheep's-milk blue if you want the sharpness the recipe assumes.
- The juice of one onionHalve an onion and grate it on the fine side of a box grater, then press the pulp in a sieve or squeeze it in a cloth. You want a teaspoon or two of juice, not the pulp, which would coarsen the texture.
- Melted butter in a cold spreadA quarter cup of melted butter is what firms this into a sliceable paste once chilled. Let the cheeses come fully to room temperature first, or the butter will seize into flecks as it hits them. Chill at least two hours before serving.
- Hollandaise, three pieces of butterDivide the half cup of butter into thirds by eye and add them in sequence over barely simmering water, whisking constantly. The half cup of boiling water at the end is a stabiliser, thinning the emulsion and reducing the chance it splits; the sauce should coat a spoon, not mound on it.
- Keep the water off the boilThe bowl or upper pan should not touch the water beneath, and the water should shiver rather than roll. Scrambled yolk is the main failure point in the method as written.
- YieldThe cheese paste makes something between a cup and a half and two cups, enough for eight to ten as a cracker spread. The hollandaise dresses asparagus for four.
Celebrity charity cookbooks of the 1910s and 1920s traded on the reader's curiosity about what stage people ate at home, and the contributions here include both a supper-party dish that could be assembled after a performance and a dinner course that showed a certain polish. The cheese paste belongs to the great American vogue for potted and blended cheeses served on crackers or toast rounds with cocktails and at receptions, a fashion helped along by the wide availability of packaged cream cheese from the 1880s onward and by imported Roquefort. The closing line about canned asparagus is the more revealing detail: tinned asparagus was a respectable pantry staple in this period rather than a compromise, in an era before long-distance refrigerated shipping made fresh out-of-season spears widely available.