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Sherry and Cheese Sandwiches
Half pound Roquefort or other cheese, ¼ as much butter and half a teaspoon paprika. Mix to a paste with sherry wine.
Spread on wafers or toasted rye bread.
A tea-table spread rather than a sandwich in the lunchbox sense. The only real judgment call is how much sherry goes in, since the original leaves it to the cook.
- The quantities in cupsHalf a pound of Roquefort is about 2 cups crumbled; a quarter as much butter is 2 oz, or half a stick. Sherry goes in a teaspoon at a time — start with two and stop as soon as the paste holds together and spreads without tearing the wafer.
- Bring both to room temperatureCold blue cheese crumbles and cold butter seizes, and you will end up beating in far too much sherry to compensate. Leave both out for an hour, then cream the butter first and work the cheese in.
- Which sherryA dry or medium sherry — fino, amontillado — is what suits a salty blue. Cream sherry makes the paste sweet and cloying against Roquefort.
- "Or other cheese"Any firm blue works: Stilton, Gorgonzola piccante, Cabrales. If you use a young mild blue, cut the butter slightly or the flavour disappears entirely.
- Salt and paprikaRoquefort is heavily salted, so no additional salt is needed. Half a teaspoon of paprika in half a pound of cheese is for colour and warmth rather than heat; smoked paprika would overwhelm the whole thing.
- Wafers versus rye"Wafers" here means a thin plain cracker of the water-biscuit type, not a sweet wafer. Spread these shortly before serving, as the paste will soften the cracker if it stands; toasted rye holds up longer and is the better choice for a party.
- Yield and make-aheadEnough for roughly 40 to 50 small wafers or 12 rounds of rye cut into quarters. The paste keeps covered in the refrigerator for several days and will need to soften again before spreading.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company, whose mills were at Keewatin, Ontario and whose head office was in Montreal, and distributed to Canadian households that bought Five Roses flour ombooks in the country in the early twentieth century, assembled largely from recipes sent in by women who used the flour. Its sandwich chapter belongs to the era of the afternoon tea, the bridge party and the church social, when sandwiches were expected to be small, crustless and numerous, and a spread that could be mixed in advance and put onto wafers at the last minute earned its place. Roquefort in a flour-company cookbook is worth noticing: imported French cheese was a real luxury, and the airy "or other cheese" is the compiler quietly acknowledging that most readers would be using whatever the local grocer stocked. Cheese creamed with butter and moistened with wine or spirits was a standard nineteenth-century treatment, related to the potted cheeses of English cookery, where the fat both smoothed the texture and helped the mixture keep.