Marie Empress
ROQUEFORT CHEESE DRESSING
Roquefort cheese Olive oil Vinegar Salt and paprika Tomato catsup Walnut catsup Blend enough olive oil with cheese to make a paste.
Add vinegar to taste and tomato catsup and walnut catsup, salt and paprika.
Serve very cold over hearts of lettuce.
Yours sincerely,
A proportionless celebrity contribution of the kind that fills this book: the method is sound but every quantity is left to the cook. Treat it as a ratio problem and build the paste first.
- Working proportionsFor about a cup of dressing, mash 3 oz Roquefort with 1/2 cup olive oil until smooth, then loosen with 2 tablespoons vinegar and add a tablespoon each of the two catsups. Adjust from there — the cheese decides how much vinegar it can take.
- The hinge is the pasteOil must be blended into the cheese before any vinegar goes in, as the recipe directs. Adding the acid first tends to leave the cheese grainy and harder to bring smooth.
- Walnut catsupA thin, dark, spiced condiment made from green walnuts, often with anchovy; a long-established English store-cupboard sauce, now rarely sold outside British specialist grocers. Worcestershire sauce or mushroom ketchup is the nearest substitute for the salty, tannic note, used sparingly to taste.
- Tomato catsup of the periodBottled ketchups of 1916 varied, and many were less sweet than the modern standard. Start with less than you think and taste before adding more vinegar.
- Paprika, not cayennePaprika here reads as colour and mild warmth in a pale dressing rather than heat. A sweet paprika is the safer reading; smoked paprika will dominate the cheese.
- Roquefort itselfGenuine Roquefort is sheep's milk and quite salty — salt the dressing last, after the cheese has been tasted in the oil. Any firm blue will work, but a milder cow's-milk blue will need more vinegar to register.
- ServingChill at least an hour; the dressing thickens as the oil cools and the flavours settle. This much dresses about four portions; "hearts of lettuce" most likely means the inner hearts of head lettuce, served in wedges.
Celebrated Actor Folks' Cookeries (1916) collected recipes solicited from stage and screen performers, printed with the contributor's closing and signature — which is why this page ends mid-courtesy with "Yours sincerely" and no amounts at all. Marie Empress was an English actress who worked in American vaudeville and silent films in the 1910s. Roquefort dressing over hearts of lettuce reads as a fashionable cold salad course of the period, and the pairing of tomato ketchup with walnut ketchup catches the older English store-cupboard condiment alongside the bottled American tomato sauce that came to eclipse it.