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Crackers and Cheese
Moisten Cream cheese with Milk to make of consistency to spread easily. Spread on Small round crackers. Put thin slice Stuffed olive in center of each cracker and a tiny Cheese ball sprinkled with Paprika in hole of olive. Do not spread crackers till ready to serve. Cheese balls may be made in advance.
An assembly job rather than a cooked dish, and the whole thing turns on timing: crackers go soft within minutes of meeting moistened cheese.
- The hingeThe instruction not to spread until serving is the recipe. Cream cheese thinned with milk will soften a cracker in ten or fifteen minutes, so set out the components and assemble in the kitchen just before the tray goes out.
- Cream cheese in 1922Cream cheese -- This means the soft, fresh, unripened cheese sold in foil-wrapped bars, essentially the same product still on shelves today. Full-fat block cheese, not whipped tub cheese, which is already loose and will need no milk at all.
- ConsistencyBring the cheese fully to room temperature first, then work in milk a teaspoon at a time. You want it just spreadable, roughly the body of thick frosting; any looser and it slumps off the cracker.
- Stuffed olivesMost often green olives stuffed with pimiento, though other stuffings were sold. Slice them crosswise about 1/8 inch thick so each round holds its shape, leaving the center opening for the cheese ball, and blot the slices dry before they go on the cheese.
- The cheese ballsThese are pea-sized, rolled from the unthinned cheese, and they sit in the pimiento hole of the olive slice. Chill them firm on a plate before assembling or they will not hold a round shape between your fingers.
- PaprikaSweet Hungarian or plain sweet paprika, used for color rather than heat. Smoked paprika is not what this recipe has in mind and overwhelms a garnish this small.
- CrackersUse a plain, lightly salted small round cracker, close to a modern butter cracker or water biscuit. Avoid anything heavily seasoned; the cheese and olive carry all the flavor.
- YieldThe original gives no quantities. An 8 oz bar of cream cheese with a few tablespoons of milk will spread roughly 40 to 50 small crackers, allowing for the balls.
This belongs to the 1920s vogue for the composed cocktail cracker, an American form built entirely on contrast of color and a tidy silhouette rather than on cooking. It draws on three things a household cook could buy ready-made: bar cream cheese sold in foil, jarred pimiento-stuffed Spanish olives, and commercially baked crackers in uniform rounds. Paprika appears constantly in such menus for the same reason it does here, as an inexpensive dash of red on a plate that is otherwise white and green. The instruction to make the cheese balls in advance but spread nothing until the last moment is a small window into how these menus were meant to work: a hostess assembling at speed between courses, with as much as possible done before the guests arrived.