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Cheese Sandwiches
Use either Neufchatel (imported) or Canadian cream cheese. If the former is very hard, you must moisten it a trifle with sweet milk or cream.
Add just a dash of paprika to give it a taste and a little salt. Finally, to each cheese add half a cup nutmeats ground in meat chopper. English walnuts are preferable. Almonds are flat in flavor.
Spread mixture on thin slices of brown bread brushed with melted butter.
FILLING No. 2 To 2 tablespoons melted butter add 1 tablespoon and a half of Five Roses flour with half a pint of milk. Cook to a thick paste. Remove from fire and add salt and paprika to taste, also ¼ teaspoon French mustard. Work into this filling a large cup grated cheese. This will keep for a week.
Two separate fillings sit under one heading here: an uncooked nut-and-cream-cheese spread, and a cooked cheese paste built on a thick white sauce. Both are tea-table fillings meant to be spread thin.
- "Each cheese" means each package"Each cheese" means each package. Neufchatel and cream cheese of this period were sold in small cakes — Philadelphia-style cream cheese in packages of roughly 3 ounces — so the ratio is probably around half a cup of ground nuts to one small cake, which makes a stiff, nut-heavy paste. Scale up proportionally for a modern 8 oz brick.
- The cheeses namedImported Neufchatel was a rind-ripened French cheese that could arrive firm and dry, which is why the recipe allows for loosening it with milk or cream; American-style Neufchatel sold today is simply a lower-fat cream cheese and needs no moistening. "Canadian cream cheese" here means fresh unripened cream cheese, not a cheddar.
- Half a pint of milkOne cup by US measure, though a Canadian book of this date may well intend the imperial half-pint, nearer 1¼ cups. Either way, with 2 tablespoons butter and 1½ tablespoons flour the base is loose and must be cooked down to a genuinely thick paste before the cheese goes in, or the filling will soak the bread.
- Add the cheese off the heatThis is the hinge of Filling No. 2. The pan comes off the fire before the grated cheese is worked in; if it goes back to a simmer the cheese breaks and the paste turns grainy and oily. A "large cup" of grated cheese is about 4 oz.
- French mustardA smooth, mild prepared mustard of the Dijon type, not the coarse-grained or the bright yellow American kind. A quarter teaspoon in this quantity is there to lift the cheese, not to be tasted as mustard.
- Grinding the nutsA meat chopper produced a dryish crumb rather than a paste. In a food processor, pulse briefly; run it continuously and English walnuts release their oil and turn to butter.
- Brown breadIn a Canadian kitchen of this period this most likely means plain whole-wheat or graham bread rather than the steamed molasses Boston brown bread. Cut thin, brush with melted butter, and trim the crusts if the sandwiches are meant to be dainty.
- "This will keep for a week"That assumed a cold icebox and daily use. A cooked milk-and-cheese paste is best treated as a three-to-four-day item in the refrigerator, closely covered so it does not skin over.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield. The nut filling from one small cheese will cover roughly a dozen thin slices, about six sandwiches cut into halves or quarters; Filling No. 2 makes noticeably more and is clearly meant to be kept and drawn on.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and distributed to promote its Five Roses flour; editions circulated widely in Canadian households from around 1913 onward, which is why Five Roses flour is named in the second filling and nowhere else in the instructions. Its sandwich recipes reflect the era's afternoon tea, bridge party and church-social spreads, where sandwiches were cut thin, crusts off, and filled with something soft enough to spread with a knife. The cream-cheese-and-walnut combination was a standard of that repertoire on both sides of the border, helped along by the small foil-wrapped cakes of fresh cheese that dairies had made cheap and reliable by the turn of the century. The second filling belongs to a different tradition altogether: a thick b eamel bound with grated cheese, essentially a cold Welsh-rabbit mixture.