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Cheese Balls
1 teaspoon salt cayenne and paprika 3 eggs 1 cup grated cheese Melt butter, add water, and cook two minutes; add seasonings and flour, boil until mixture forms in a mass in center of pan. Cool slightly, add eggs unbeaten, one at a time, add cheese, drop from teaspoon into hot fat, drain, and serve immediately.
This is a cheese-flavoured choux paste fried in deep fat — what a French kitchen would call beignets au fromage. The ingredient list as printed is incomplete, so read the method first and reconstruct the paste from standard proportions.
- The missing quantitiesThe printed list gives only salt, cayenne and paprika, 3 eggs and 1 cup grated cheese, yet the method calls for butter, water and flour. A standard choux base for three eggs is 1 cup water, 1/2 cup butter and 1 cup flour; the original amounts are genuinely lost here rather than inferable from the text.
- "Cook two minutes"This means bringing the butter and water to a full rolling boil, not a gentle warming. The recipe adds the flour straight to the boiling liquid; many cooks prefer to draw the pan off the heat while stirring the flour in, then return it to the burner.
- Forms a mass in the centre of the panThis is the hinge. Keep stirring over heat until the paste pulls cleanly away from the sides and a thin film sets on the pan bottom — usually two to three minutes. Underdried paste absorbs fat and collapses.
- Eggs unbeaten, one at a timeLet the paste cool to about 140F first, or the eggs scramble. Beat each egg in until the mass comes back together and looks glossy before adding the next.
- The cheeseThe recipe specifies only "grated cheese." A dry aged cheese suits the paste best, such as an aged Cheddar or a hard grating cheese like Parmesan. Pre-shredded supermarket cheese carries anti-caking starch and gives a duller, pastier result.
- Frying temperatureThe recipe says only "hot fat"; about 375F answers. Lower and the balls soak fat before they puff; much higher and the outside browns while the centre stays raw dough. Fry in small batches so the oil temperature holds, three to five minutes, turning until deep gold and hollow-sounding.
- Serve immediatelyMeant literally. Choux fritters deflate and turn leathery within ten minutes and do not reheat well.
- YieldA three-egg batch dropped from a teaspoon gives roughly 30 to 36 small balls — an appetizer for six to eight.
Cheese balls of this kind are choux paste put to a savoury use, a trick French cookery had worked out long before it reached American household books; the same paste, sweetened or not, makes cream puffs, gougères and pommes dauphine. Lowney's, published by the Walter M. Lowney chocolate company, was one of many manufacturer-sponsored cookbooks of the turn of the twentieth century, and like its peers it padded the chocolate recipes out with a full general cookery course — hence a deep-fried cheese savoury at all. Small fried savouries were fashionable then as an accompaniment to soup or salad, a role gougères still play, and the reliance on a deep kettle of fat rather than an oven reflects kitchens where stovetop heat was far easier to judge than oven heat.