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Roquefort Sandwiches
Make a paste of Roquefort cheese, one-quarter as much butter, a little Pompeian Olive Oil, pepper and salt.
Spread on buttered toast.
Imported Pompeian Olive Oil is the standard by which all table oils are judged.
A cheese spread rather than a sandwich in the two-slice sense, and the original gives no quantities at all beyond the butter ratio. The proportions below are a starting point; the mixture should be soft enough to spread without tearing toast.
- Working quantities4 oz Roquefort to 1 oz butter follows the stated one-quarter rule and makes enough for six to eight small open sandwiches. Add the oil a teaspoon at a time — a tablespoon is usually plenty.
- Bring both to room temperatureThis is the hinge. Cold Roquefort crumbles instead of creaming, and cold butter forces you to overwork the paste into a greasy mass. Leave both out for half an hour and mash with a fork.
- Salt with careRoquefort is heavily salted in the curing, so taste before adding any. The pepper is the more useful of the two seasonings here.
- The olive oilPompeian was the brand paying for the book; any decent extra-virgin oil does the same job of loosening the paste and rounding the sharpness. A mild, buttery oil suits the cheese better than a peppery Tuscan one.
- Buttered toastThe recipe butters the toast and puts butter in the paste, which is characteristic of the period. One or the other is enough for most tastes. Toast thin slices, trim the crusts, and spread while barely warm so the paste softens but does not run.
- Substituting the cheeseTrue Roquefort is sheep's-milk and protected by French appellation. Any firm blue — Stilton, Bleu d'Auvergne, Maytag — works, but cow's-milk blues are often milder and less salty, so season accordingly.
- ServingThe recipe gives no serving directions; spreads of this kind were commonly offered with salad or as a savoury at the end of a meal rather than as lunch. Cut into fingers or rounds and serve the day they are made.
This comes from one of the recipe booklets issued by the Pompeian Olive Oil Company of Baltimore, which distributed small cookbooks in the early decades of the twentieth century to persuade American households that olive oil belonged on the table rather than in the medicine cabinet — imported oil had long been sold in good part as a laxative and a dressing for burns. The closing line about the standard by which all table oils are judged is advertising copy, and recipes in these collections often carry a version of it. The dish itself reflects the Edwardian and post-Edwardian taste for the savoury: a small, sharply seasoned cheese course served after dessert or alongside a salad, a habit borrowed from British dining and kept alive in American club and hotel menus. Roquefort, made from ewe's milk and ripened in the limestone caves at Combalou in the Aveyron, was the prestige blue of the period and appears constantly in American recipe books of the 1900s and 1910s as a marker of continental refinement.