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Cheese Paste for Sandwiches
6 ounces grated cheese 4 tablespoons tomato puree Pepper, salt Mix the grated cheese to a smooth paste with the tomato puree; add pepper and salt to taste. The paste will keep for three or four days, but it must be kept covered. Spread on thin bread and butter.
A two-ingredient spread that depends entirely on the cheese being grated fine enough to bind. Nothing here needs updating except the choice of cheese and how long you trust it in the refrigerator.
- The hinge: grate finelyWith no butter or cream to emulsify, the paste holds together only because the cheese is reduced to a fine crumb. Use the small holes of a box grater or a food processor; coarse shreds will sit in the puree rather than combine with it.
- Cheese quantity6 ounces is about 1 1/2 to 2 cups grated, depending on how dry the cheese is. The recipe names no variety; a firm English cheese such as Cheddar or Cheshire suits it, while a hard aged cheese will give a stiffer, more crumbly paste.
- Tomato pureeIn older British books puree often meant sieved cooked tomato, closer to what is sold now as passata or thin tomato sauce than to modern concentrated tomato paste, though concentrate was also sold under the same name. If you use the concentrated tube or can product, start with about two tablespoons and thin with water until it spreads.
- Keeping timeThree or four days assumes a cool larder and constant use. Refrigerated in a covered jar it will keep about that long, but the tomato slowly weeps and the paste turns watery; stir it back together before spreading.
- Bread and butterThe butter is structural, not decorative: it seals the bread against the moisture in the puree so the sandwiches do not go soggy. Butter both slices right to the edge.
- YieldEnough for roughly 8 to 10 thin sandwich halves, or a small crock for tea. Seasoning generously matters, since cheese and tomato both flatten out when cold.
Meatless cookery in the early twentieth century leaned hard on cheese, which was among the cheaper concentrated proteins in a British kitchen and is often said to have stood in wherever a recipe would otherwise have called for potted meat. Potted and pasted spreads like this one are the vegetarian answer to the pots of pounded ham and tongue that filled sandwich chapters of the same era: the same technique of working a protein into a smooth, spreadable mass that would keep a few days under a cover in the larder. Tomato puree was a commercial product sold in tins, and it does double duty here as both moistener and acid, cutting the fattiness of the cheese in a way that butter alone would not. Thin bread and butter, cut and trimmed, was the fixed form of the tea sandwich, and the instruction to spread on it reflects the usual way such a paste was served.