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Cheese Sandwich
Grind 1 pound cream cheese with 1 green pepper and one-half Spanish onion. Mix with cooked dressing and spread between white bread or brown bread.
A pimiento-cheese spread of the boiled-dressing school, written for cooks who owned a meat grinder and made their own salad dressing from scratch.
- Cooked dressingThis means boiled dressing: a cooked custard of egg, flour or cornstarch, vinegar, mustard and a little butter or milk, thickened over water and cooled. It is tangier and less oily than mayonnaise, which is what makes the spread work. Bottled mayonnaise thinned with a spoonful of cider vinegar is the nearest substitute.
- Cream cheeseIn this period the term covered soft fresh unripened cheeses, from a Neufchatel-style curd to something close to what we now sell in foil bricks. Modern block cream cheese is fine; whipped tub cheese will make the spread slack.
- GrindingA hand meat grinder was the intended tool. A food processor does the same job, but pulse the pepper and onion first, then add the cheese in chunks — running it all together turns the cheese to paste and weeps liquid.
- Green pepperAn ordinary green bell pepper. Core and seed it; the ribs are bitter and the seeds will not break down.
- Spanish onionA large, mild, pale-skinned onion. Half of one is easily 4 to 6 ounces, which is aggressive against a pound of cheese — start with a quarter and taste, or salt the chopped onion, drain it, and pat it dry.
- Drain the vegetablesPepper and onion are mostly water and this is the one thing that decides whether the sandwich holds. Squeeze the ground vegetables in a towel before mixing, and add the dressing a spoonful at a time until the mass just spreads.
- SeasoningThe recipe gives none. It wants salt, and takes well to a little paprika or cayenne and a grind of pepper.
- Yield and holdingA pound of cheese plus vegetables makes roughly 3 cups of spread — 16 to 20 sandwiches on standard sliced bread. Keep it refrigerated and use within two days; the raw onion sharpens as it sits.
Mary A. Wilson wrote for the Philadelphia Public Ledger, and her sandwich chapter is aimed at uses like the lunch box, the afternoon tea table and the church supper — occasions that wanted a spread made in bulk from a bowl rather than a composed sandwich built to order. Ground cheese-and-pepper fillings of this kind appear often in American sandwich cookery of the 1910s and 1920s, when small hand grinders were cheap and commercial soft cheese was becoming more widely available; a closely similar formula, with sweet red pimientos in place of the green pepper, is related to the pimiento cheese still sold in the South. The instruction to bind with "cooked dressing" rather than mayonnaise is a period marker: boiled dressing was commonly made at home from pantry staples, and it persisted well into the era when jarred mayonnaise began to displace it. Offering white or brown bread as equals may reflect the reputation darker breads had acquired for wholesomeness.