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Mrs Mac's Cheese
One-quarter pound of well-ripened Roquefort cheese grated; add one tablespoon of butter, one also of brandy, one-half saltspoon of salt, dash of tabasco, a little paprika. Mix thoroughly till pasty and put in small jars or cups, When hard turn out and serve with coffee. The longer it stands the better it is. Mrs McLaren.
A potted cheese in the old style: no cooking, just cheese worked smooth with butter and spirits, pressed into moulds and turned out. The whole thing takes five minutes and depends entirely on the quality of the Roquefort.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so half a saltspoon is an eighth. With Roquefort at this ratio you may not need any salt at all; taste the paste before adding it.
- Quantities in modern termsA quarter pound is 4 oz (about 115 g) of cheese to 1 tablespoon each of butter and brandy. That yields roughly half a cup of paste, enough for four to six people as a savoury.
- Grate or mashRoquefort is too soft and crumbly to grate on a box grater; crumble it and mash it with a fork or work it in a food processor. The butter should be genuinely soft, not merely cool, or the mixture will stay lumpy rather than going pasty.
- Why it hardensThe setting comes from the butter, not from any cooking or curing, so the jars must go in the refrigerator. Line the cups with plastic wrap if you want a clean turn-out.
- "The longer it stands"A few days in the refrigerator does let the brandy and paprika settle into the cheese, and the flavour improves. Treat it like any fresh cheese spread and finish it within about a week.
- Serve with coffee'with coffee' suggests the savoury course, taken at the end of dinner rather than the start rather than as a first course. Turn the moulds out and offer plain crackers, dry toast or water biscuits; sweet accompaniments fight the salt.
- Tabasco and paprikaA dash was never a fixed measure; read it as a drop or two. The recipe mixes the paprika in, but if you would rather keep the paste a cleaner colour you can dust it over the turned-out mould instead.
Potted cheese belongs to the same family of British and American preserving traditions as potted meat and potted shrimp: a strongly flavoured food pounded with butter, packed tight and sealed, which keeps longer than the raw ingredient and travels to the table ready to spread. Recipes like this one also served as a savoury course — the small, salty, often cheese-based dish served after the sweet and before or with the coffee, a habit that persisted in English dining well into the twentieth century. Roquefort, France's sheep's-milk blue from the caves of Roquefort-sur-Soulzon, was among the most prestigious blue cheeses obtainable outside France, which may be why it is specified here rather than a local cheese. The title appears to be an affectionate shortening of the contributor's name: recipes signed with a member's name were a standard feature of community and magazine cookery collections.