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Cheese Sandwiches
To half a cup of mild grated cheese and half a cup of Roquefort cheese rubbed to a paste, add one teaspoon of paprika and half a cup of cream. till smooth and spread between graham bread.
A soft cheese spread rather than a cooked sandwich, and the proportions need a little judgment. The original line has lost a word — read it as "beat till smooth."
- Cream, added by degreesHalf a cup of cream to one cup of cheese gives a spread loose enough to run out of the sandwich. Add it a tablespoon at a time and stop when the mixture holds a soft peak on the spoon; you may need only half the stated amount, depending on how dry the Roquefort is.
- "Mild grated cheese"In an American kitchen of this period this most likely means a plain domestic cheddar, bought in a piece and grated at home. A young mild cheddar or a Monterey Jack does the job; anything sharp will fight the blue.
- RoquefortTrue Roquefort is sheep's milk and quite salty. Any firm blue — Stilton, Maytag, Gorgonzola piccante — works, but taste before salting anything else in the meal, and mash it with a fork into a genuine paste before the cream goes in so you don't get gritty lumps.
- PaprikaA full teaspoon is a lot by modern standards; the paprika sold in America at this date was generally mild and used as much for colour as for flavour. With fresh sweet Hungarian paprika, start with half a teaspoon; with hot paprika, a quarter.
- Graham breadCoarse whole-wheat bread, named for Sylvester Graham's unsifted flour — not the sweet graham cracker. Any dense whole-wheat sandwich loaf is right; it wants to be firm, since the filling is wet.
- TemperatureMix at room temperature so the cheeses come together, then chill the spread for half an hour before assembling. Cold filling spreads without tearing the bread and the sandwiches cut cleanly.
- YieldRoughly a cup and a quarter to a cup and a half of spread, depending on how much cream goes in; enough for four or five sandwiches, or a dozen or so small crustless tea sandwiches cut in fingers or triangles.
- KeepingThe spread holds three or four days covered in the refrigerator and firms up considerably; let it soften before spreading. Assembled sandwiches go soggy within a few hours.
Blue-cheese sandwich fillings like this one belong to the era when the American tea table and the club luncheon adopted French cheeses as a mark of sophistication; by the 1900s Roquefort appeared regularly in cookbook chapters on salads, canapes and sandwiches. Pairing it with a bland domestic cheese and cream was practical as well as diplomatic: it stretched an expensive import and tamed its salt. The graham bread is the other half of the period's signature, a legacy of Sylvester Graham's campaign of the 1830s and 1840s for coarse unsifted flour, which by the time of this book had shed most of its reforming zeal and simply become the fashionable bread for sandwiches thought to be a little more wholesome than white.