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Easter Salad (With the smooth sides)
With the smooth sides of butter - hands roll Neufchatel cheese into small egg shapes. Cut
The text as printed breaks off mid-instruction, so what survives is the shaping step of a moulded cheese salad rather than a complete method. The technique itself is straightforward, and the missing portion is easy to infer from other Easter salads of the period.
- The text is incompleteThe entry stops at "Cut"; the missing direction may have concerned cutting lettuce or cress into a nest, or cutting the cheese eggs in half, but the page does not say. Treat this as a component, not a standalone dish.
- Butter handsThese are the pair of small ribbed wooden paddles once sold for patting butter into shape. One face is grooved, the other smooth; the recipe wants the smooth face so the cheese comes out glossy rather than ridged. Two chilled dinner knives, or two small silicone spatulas dipped in cold water, do the same job.
- NeufchatelAmerican Neufchâtel, not the French bloomy-rind cheese of the same name. It is a fresh cheese of roughly the same character as cream cheese but with less fat and more moisture, still sold in blocks in many supermarkets. It rolls cleanly when cold and turns sticky as it warms.
- Keep everything coldThe hinge of the operation. Chill the cheese hard, wet the paddles in ice water between eggs, and set the finished shapes in the refrigerator until serving, or they slump.
- Size and yieldRead "small egg shapes" as roughly 1 oz each; on that basis an 8 oz block gives eight, enough for four to six salads. The recipe itself specifies no size or yield.
- The rest of the saladA nest of shredded lettuce, watercress or blanched celery would be a plausible setting for the cheese eggs, with a dressing passed separately so the cheese does not soften; the surviving text does not say how the salad was finished.
- TintingCheese for such dishes was sometimes tinted with paprika, spinach juice or beet juice, though this recipe calls for none. If you do colour it, add the colouring before shaping; kneading afterwards ruins the surface.
Salad books treated holidays as an occasion for representational food, and Easter reliably produced eggs, nests and chicks made of anything but egg — cheese, aspic, moulded chicken forcemeat, hard-boiled eggs restuffed and reassembled. Such dishes belonged to the ladies' luncheon, a meal built on cold, decorative, largely meatless courses that a hostess could arrange in advance. American Neufchâtel was a natural material for it: soft enough to model, firm enough to hold a shape, and by this date widely available in factory-made blocks. The cheese is generally traced to dairies in Orange County, New York, in the 1870s, where attempts to copy the French original produced the richer fresh cheese that became known as cream cheese. Butter hands, the tool specified here, were standard kitchen equipment when butter was still worked and shaped at home.