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Cheese Fingers
2 slices of toast 1 tablespoon cream 2 tablespoons grated Parmesan 2 ounces sweet almonds 1 tablespoon chopped parsley Pepper and salt to taste Blanch the almonds, and cut them in four, fry in the butter till a golden brown, and drain well. Mix together the cream and cheese, pepper, salt and chopped parsley, and spread the mixture on the toast; cut into lengths about one and one-half inches wide, sprinkle the almonds on top; serve hot.
A savoury of the old school: toast, cheese paste, fried almonds. It comes together in about ten minutes, but the ingredient list has a gap worth catching before you start.
- The missing butterThe method says to fry the almonds in butter, but no butter appears in the ingredient list. Allow about a tablespoon, enough to keep 2 oz of almond slivers moving in a small pan.
- "Sweet almonds"This only means ordinary edible almonds, as distinct from the bitter almonds sold in the period for flavouring. Any blanched whole almond works; buy them already blanched and skip a step.
- Cutting them in fourQuartering a blanched almond lengthwise gives coarse slivers. Sliced almonds are a reasonable stand-in, though they brown much faster and can scorch in under a minute.
- CreamUse heavy or whipping cream. The point is to bind the grated Parmesan into a spreadable paste, so add it a little at a time rather than dumping in the full tablespoon.
- ParmesanGrate it fresh and fine. Pre-grated Parmesan is drier and saltier, and you will want to hold back on the added salt if you use it.
- Serving hotThe cheese mixture is spread on the toast and not cooked further, so work quickly and cut the fingers just before serving. If you want the topping to soften and gloss, thirty seconds under a hot broiler is enough; longer and the cream separates.
- YieldTwo slices of toast cut into fingers gives about six pieces, which is one modest savoury course for two people or a small plate of canapes for four.
Cheese fingers belong to the savoury, the small salty course that came after the sweet at an English dinner in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: anchovy toast, devilled almonds, cheese straws, mushrooms on toast. Its appearance here under "Meat Substitutes" suggests how vegetarian and meatless cookery books of the period built their repertoire, drawing on an existing tradition of dishes that happened never to have contained meat in the first place. Cheese and nuts were commonly treated in these books as the protein-bearing foods, which may be why almonds turn up fried in butter on top of a Parmesan paste rather than in a dessert. The distinction between sweet and bitter almonds, spelled out casually in the ingredient list, was a live one when both were stocked by grocers and only the sweet kind was safe to eat in quantity.