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Cheese Balls for Salad
To two packages of Neufchatel cheese add one-half teaspoon of onion juice and two tablespoons of lemon juice.
Add a dash of ground tabasco if desired.
Mold into small balls with butter paddles and serve with lettuce or salad.- Lida P. Wilson, Omaha.
A three-line cheese recipe that depends almost entirely on how much cheese a "package" was. Everything else is seasoning and shaping.
- What a package meantAmerican Neufchatel of this era was sold in small packages, commonly around 3 ounces, much like the cream cheese packages then on the market, so two packages is likely nearer 6 ounces than the 16 ounces two modern 8-ounce bricks would give. If your packages are larger, hold back some of the lemon juice or the mixture will be too loose to hold a ball.
- Neufchatel todayThe supermarket product labelled Neufchatel in the United States is a lower-fat cream cheese, close enough in behavior to work here. The French Neufchâtel, a soft bloomy-rind cheese from Normandy, is a different thing entirely and will not mold into balls.
- Ground tabascoThis most likely means dried, ground tabasco pepper, a cayenne-type powder, rather than the bottled sauce. A pinch of cayenne is the direct substitute; a few drops of hot sauce will also do.
- Onion juiceGrate a peeled onion on the fine side of a box grater and press the pulp through a fine sieve, or squeeze it in cheesecloth. Half a teaspoon is genuinely all that is wanted; the point is a savory background, not onion flavor.
- Butter paddlesRidged wooden paddles, scalded and then chilled in ice water, were used to roll butter into pats and worked equally well on soft cheese. Two small wooden salad servers do the same job, as do damp hands or two teaspoons.
- Chill before shapingLemon juice and onion juice both slacken soft cheese. Refrigerate the mixture for half an hour before rolling, and again after shaping, or the balls will sag on the lettuce.
- YieldSix ounces of cheese makes about twelve balls the size of a large marble — enough to garnish four to six salad plates.
Cheese balls of this kind belong to the era when the composed salad plate, a leaf or two of lettuce with something molded set on top, was the mark of a properly served luncheon. Neufchatel had been made in the United States since the 1870s, when New York State dairies began copying the French name for a soft fresh cheese, and by the time this book was compiled it was a cheap and reliable pantry item sold in the same small bricks as cream cheese. The recipe's contributor system is worth noting: this came in from a reader — Lida P. Wilson of Omaha — and was printed under her name, which is why so many entries in these collections read like something dictated across a kitchen table rather than written by a professional. The butter paddles she calls for were standard equipment in any household that still handled its own butter, and their ridges left the faint grooved pattern that once marked a hand-shaped pat.