Cheese, Pounded
INGREDIENTS. - To every lb. of cheese allow 3 oz. of fresh butter.
To pound cheese is an economical way of using it if it has become dry; it is exceedingly good spread on bread, and is the best way of eating it for those whose digestion is weak. Cut up the cheese into small pieces, and pound it smoothly in a mortar, adding butter in the above proportion.
Press it down into a jar, covered with clarified butter, and it will keep for several days. The flavour may be very much increased by adding mixed mustard (about a teaspoonful to every pound), or cayenne, or pounded mace. Curry-powder is also not unfrequently mixed with it.
This is potted cheese: dry ends of hard cheese worked to a paste with butter and sealed in a jar. A food processor does in thirty seconds what the mortar did in ten minutes, and the proportions still work.
- The cheese to useThe recipe specifies only cheese that "has become dry," which in this period would usually mean a hard household cheese such as Cheddar or Cheshire. Soft or fresh cheeses will not pound to the same smooth paste and will not keep.
- The proportion3 oz butter to 1 lb cheese is about 85 g to 450 g, roughly a 1:5 ratio by weight. That is a fairly stiff paste; add another ounce if you want it soft enough to spread straight from the fridge.
- Butter must be unsalted-ish and soft"Fresh butter" in Victorian usage means unsalted, as opposed to the heavily salted butter kept for storage. Mature cheese brings plenty of salt on its own, so unsalted butter is still the right choice.
- Mortar versus processorGrate the cheese first, then pulse with the softened butter. Over-processing warms the mixture and it can turn greasy; stop as soon as it comes together and let it firm in the jar.
- Clarified butter sealMelt butter gently, skim the foam, and pour off the clear fat leaving the milk solids behind. Poured over the packed jar it sets to a cover that largely excludes air — the Victorian equivalent of cling film.
- Keeping time"Several days" assumed a cold larder and a butter seal. Refrigerate it, treat the seal as a convenience rather than a preservative, and eat it within a week; once the seal is broken, a few days.
- The seasoningsA teaspoon of made English mustard per pound is the classic; cayenne should be a pinch, and mace a scant quarter-teaspoon, both of which are easily overdone against a strong cheese. Taste before potting, since the flavour intensifies as it sits.
- YieldA pound of cheese and its butter makes about 535 g of paste — enough to fill two half-pint jars, and enough for a great many rounds of toast.
Potted cheese belongs to the long English tradition of potting — meat, fish, shrimps, cheese — pounded with butter and sealed under more butter, a preserving method that predates reliable refrigeration and survives today mainly in potted shrimp. Beeton's framing is characteristically frugal and characteristically medical: it is offered first as "an economical way of using it if it has become dry," a use for the hard grey end of the household cheese, and second as easier on "those whose digestion is weak," implying that cheese was thought to sit heavily on the stomach unless broken down first. The optional curry-powder is a small marker of date — by the mid-nineteenth century commercial curry powder was an ordinary British store-cupboard item, ready to be stirred into almost anything savoury. The dish anticipates the pub cheese and potted Cheddar still sold in crocks.