Home › Cheese Dishes › Cheese Balls
Cheese Balls
Beat the whites of 2 eggs to a stiff froth, add a pinch of salt and a few grains of cayenne pepper, then add 2 tablespoonfuls of grated cheese, mixing all thoroughly. It should be quite a dry paste. Roll this mixture into small balls; brush over with beaten egg, roll in fine bread crumbs and fry to a golden color in smoking hot fat, drain on white paper and serve at once on a folded napkin.
A two-ingredient fritter that depends entirely on the stiffness of the whites and the heat of the fat. Both are easy to get wrong.
- Fold, do not stirThe whites carry the whole structure — there is no flour or binder here. Whip to firm peaks, then fold the cheese in with a spatula. Note that the recipe does call for "mixing all thoroughly" to a "quite dry paste," so some loss of volume is expected; keeping the strokes few gives a lighter ball.
- What "grated cheese" meansAlmost certainly a dry hard cheese, grated fine — aged Cheddar, or Parmesan for a sharper result. Anything moist or young, including pre-shredded cheese coated in anti-caking starch, will loosen the paste and it will not roll.
- The proportion is smallTwo tablespoons of cheese to two whites reads as a very lean mix, and it is: these are meant to be light and puffed rather than cheesy. If you want more flavour, go up to about a quarter cup and expect a slightly heavier ball.
- "Smoking hot fat" is 375FReading "smoking hot fat" -- Rendered fats of the kind a period kitchen used generally smoked lower than modern refined oils, so treat the instruction as a rough cue rather than a precise one. About 375F works: below that the coating soaks, above it the crumbs colour before the inside sets. Deep enough fat for the balls to float free, and fry in small batches.
- Egg wash and crumbsUse a whole beaten egg for the wash and fine dry crumbs, not fresh ones — fresh crumbs hold moisture and slide off the fragile balls. Handle with two spoons rather than fingers.
- Drain and serve immediately"White paper" means a plain absorbent paper; a rack over a tray works better. These deflate within a few minutes of leaving the fat, so they cannot be held or reheated. The folded napkin is a serving convention of the era.
- YieldA small quantity — perhaps six to eight little balls; a savoury or garnish for two or three, not a course on its own.
Cheese balls of this kind belong to the long English and American tradition of the savoury, the small hot cheese dish served at the end of dinner or as a relish alongside soup, of which cheese straws and Welsh rarebit are the better-known survivors. Two eggs, a couple of spoonfuls of grated cheese and some stale bread turned into hot fried morsels stretched a scrap of hard cheese too dry for the table into something that looked like company food. The folded napkin in the serving instruction is a genteel touch borrowed from formal service, where fried items were sent up on a napkin-lined dish to soak the fat — a convention that persisted in household manuals.