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Cheese Fruits
Little cheese fruits are very pretty to serve with the salad course or with hors d'œuvres. Take a package of cream cheese, unwrap, and put it in a bowl; cream with a fork until soft enough to form into balls with butter paddles - the smooth sides. Roll each small ball in paprika, until coated; in one end stick a whole clove and in the other a stem, thus simulating small apples. To make tiny carrots use pimento cheese, creamed until soft enough to shape into the form of a small carrot. Stick a tiny sprig of carrot leaf in the large end, and serve with salad.
A shaping-and-garnishing job rather than a cooked dish, and the only real difficulties are the vanished equipment and the vagueness about what counts as a package of cheese.
- The hinge: cheese temperatureCream the cheese only until it is workable, then chill the shaped fruits until firm before serving. Cheese creamed at full room temperature slumps, and the paprika coating goes damp and streaky within an hour.
- "A package of cream cheese"In the period this commonly meant a small 3-ounce foil-wrapped brick, though larger packages were also sold. If you buy a modern 8-ounce block, scale the rest of the garnish accordingly.
- Butter paddlesRidged wooden hand-paddles for working butter, then sold in any hardware store and now mostly an antique-shop item. The recipe specifies the smooth sides, so two small silicone spatulas, or simply cold hands, do the same work.
- PaprikaUse sweet Hungarian or generic sweet paprika for colour. Smoked paprika reads as barbecue rather than apple skin, and hot paprika will overwhelm three ounces of cheese.
- Cloves and stemsThe recipe does not say which end takes the clove; by convention it stands in for the blossom end. Nor does it specify the "stem", so a clove stem, a short piece of dried stalk or a sliver of cinnamon stick will serve. Cloves are edible but harshly strong, so warn guests or pull them at the table.
- Pimento cheese for the carrotsPimento cheese was often sold in this period as a firm processed cheese spread, closer to a modern cold-pack spread than to the loose mayonnaise-bound Southern dip, though home versions varied. If your pimento cheese is wet, drain it or stiffen it with plain cream cheese before shaping.
- Carrot leafCarrot tops are edible but rarely sold attached now; a small sprig of dill, fennel frond or parsley gives the same silhouette. Rinse and dry it thoroughly so the greenery does not wet the cheese.
- Yield and servingFigure two or three pieces per person as a garnish alongside the salad or on an hors d'œuvre tray. They can be made several hours ahead, kept covered and refrigerated, and rolled in paprika shortly before serving.
Cheese fruits belong to the trompe-l'œil school of American entertaining that flourished between the wars, when a hostess was expected to make food look like something other than itself: aspics moulded into rings, radishes cut into roses, cream cheese pressed into apples and carrots. The technique depended on cream cheese in a standard small package, a firm, uniform modelling medium available year-round, and on paprika, which was often reached for as a garnish for anything pale. That the instructions casually assume butter paddles in the reader's drawer is a reminder of how recently butter was still worked by hand at home. The salad course itself was then a fixed part of a formal menu rather than a first course or a meal, which is why a decorative nibble of this kind needed no further justification; when the elaborate served salad course faded after the Second World War, its garnishes went with it.