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Some Kitchen Kinks: Salad
Plain Cheese Salad.
APPENDIX Cut Edam or ordinary American cheese into thin pieces, scatter them over lettuce leaves, and serve with French dressing.
Olive and Pimiento Sandwich or Salad Cheese.
Mash any of the soft cream cheeses and add chopped olives and pimientos in equal parts. This mixture requires much salt to make it palatable to most palates, the amount depending chiefly on the quantity of pimiento used. The mixture may be spread between thin slices of bread or it may be made into a roll or molded, cut into slices, and served on lettuce leaves with French dressing.
Cheese and Tomato Salad.
Stuff cold tomatoes with cream cheese and serve on lettuce leaves with French dressing.
Cheese and Pimiento Salad.
Stuff canned pimientos with cream cheese, cut into slices, and serve one or two slices to each person on lettuce leaves with French dressing. Cheese Jelly Salad. 1/2 cupful of grated cheese. 1 tablespoonful of gelatin. 1 cupful of whipped cream.
Salt and pepper to taste Mix the cheese with the whipped cream, season to taste with salt and pepper, and add to the gelatin dissolved in a scant cupful of water. This may be molded in a large mold or in small molds.
When the jelly begins to harden, cover with grated cheese. The jelly should be served on a lettuce leaf, preferably with a cream dressing or a French dressing, to which a little grated cheese has been added.
Cheese Salad and Preserves.
Epicures have devised a dish which consists of lettuce with French dressor ing served with cream cheese and thick preparations of currants other fruits preserved in honey or sugar, which, owing to the fact that the seeds have been extracted by a laborious process, are fairly expensive. The soft cheese often found in market is also relatively expensive.
There is a suggestion in this dish, however, for others which are much less costly. Buttermilk cream, or ordinary cottage cheese served with lettuce or other green salad and small amount of rich homemade preserves, is a combination with much the same character, and also very appetizing. a a Deviled Eggs with Cheese.
In making deviled eggs, either to be eaten alone or upon lettuce leaves in the form of salad, a little grated cheese may be mixed with the yolks in addition to the usual salad dressing and flavorings with which the yolks are mixed.
Cheese and Celery.
Cut stalks of celery having deep grooves in them into pieces about 2 inches long. Fill the grooves with cream cheese salted or flavored with chopped pimientos, and serve with bread and butter as a salad course or serve as a relish at the beginning of a meal.
Although not cheese dishes, strictiy speaking, the following salad dressings made with buttermilk cream may be included in this section.
Buttermilk Salad Dressing. ½ cupful of buttermilk cream. 1 tablespoonful of vinegar. 1/4 teaspoonful of salt.
Cayenne pepper.
This dressing is particularly suitable for serving with cucumbers. Buttermilk Cream Horseradish Salad Dressing.
To buttermilk cream add a little grated horseradish and vinegar and salt. Serve on whole or sliced tomatoes.
A run of cheese salads from the book's appendix, written for cooks who kept a crock of soft cheese and a bottle of oil-and-vinegar dressing on hand. Most of it translates directly; a few of the ingredients no longer mean what they meant.
- The hinge: the cheese jellyWhipped cream folded into fully liquid gelatin will separate and collapse. Chill the dissolved gelatin until it is thick and syrupy, then fold in the cheese-and-cream mixture and mold at once.
- "French dressing"In this period it means a plain vinaigrette — roughly three parts oil to one part vinegar, salt and pepper, whisked or shaken before use. It is not the sweet orange bottled dressing sold under that name today.
- "Ordinary American cheese"A plain factory-made cheddar, firm enough to slice thin. Processed cheese slices are a later product and will not behave like it here.
- "Cream cheese"The soft market cheeses of this period were fresh, unripened and closer to Neuf ch tel or a drained fromage blanc than to modern block cream cheese. If using the block, beat in a spoonful or two of cream so it will pipe into celery grooves and pimientos.
- Buttermilk creamButtermilk cream is not defined in the text; it is usually taken to be the thick cream that rises on churned buttermilk, and it is not sold now. Cr me fra che, thick cultured sour cream, or well-drained cottage cheese blended smooth will all stand in for it in the dressings and the preserves salad.
- The buttermilk dressing measurementThe printed page was checked, and the quantity is what our text now gives. With only a tablespoon of vinegar and a quarter teaspoon of salt to that much buttermilk, the dressing is mild; adjust the acid and salt by taste.
- Gelatin quantityA tablespoon of granulated gelatin is about one and a quarter modern envelopes, enough to set the scant cup of water plus the cream firmly. For a softer, spoonable mold use a single envelope.
- Canned pimientosThey tear easily. Drain them well and pat dry before stuffing, or the dressing will thin out on the plate. The salt warning in the olive-and-pimiento mixture is sound — pimiento is sweet and mutes everything around it.
- YieldOnly the pimiento salad states a yield u2014 one or two slices to each person. No yield is given for the jelly; in small molds it will make roughly four to six.
These entries sit in the appendix rather than the main text, which is why they read as suggestions rather than formulas u2014 cheese as a salad ingredient here sits alongside the contemporary fashion for gelatin molds and for lettuce as a base rather than a garnish. Canned pimientos are the tell: sweet red peppers were imported from Spain before being grown commercially in Georgia, and by the 1910s the canned article was cheap and widely used in sandwich spreads. The book's real preoccupation is economy, and it shows in the frank note that the epicures' seedless honey preserves and market cream cheese are expensive, and that cottage cheese with homemade preserves will do the same work. Buttermilk cream, recommended here for two dressings, would have been a byproduct in a household still churning its own butter.