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Cheese and Anchovy Sandwiches
Cream two tablespoons butter, and add one-fourth cup grated Young America Cheese and one teaspoon vinegar. Season with salt, paprika, mustard, and anchovy sauce. Spread mixture between thin slices of bread.
A spreadable compound butter sharpened with cheese and anchovy, of the sort Fannie Farmer's era served at teas and card parties. The whole thing rests on the seasonings, which the original leaves entirely to your judgment.
- Young America cheeseA mild, young factory cheddar sold in small wheels, common in American groceries around 1900 and largely gone under that name. A mild yellow cheddar, aged no more than a few months, is the closest match; anything sharp will fight the anchovy.
- Anchovy sauceNot the fish sauce of Southeast Asia but a bottled English condiment of anchovy, vinegar and spice, related to anchovy essence and Gentleman's Relish. Anchovy paste thinned with a little water does the same job; start with half a teaspoon, since it is saltier than the bottled sauce.
- Season by taste, not by guessSalt, paprika and mustard are given without quantities because the cheese and the anchovy sauce both carry salt. Mix, taste on a scrap of bread, then adjust — the mixture should read savoury and slightly hot, not merely salty.
- MustardIn this book 'mustard' in a seasoning list usually means dry mustard powder rather than prepared mustard. A quarter teaspoon is a reasonable starting point.
- Cream the butter properlyThe butter must be genuinely soft and beaten pale before the cheese goes in, or the grated cheese will stay in visible shreds and the spread will tear thin bread.
- The vinegarOne teaspoon in two tablespoons of butter is a noticeable amount; it is there to lift the fat, not to be tasted on its own. Plain cider or white wine vinegar suits it better than anything strongly flavoured.
- Bread and assemblyThin slices from a close-grained white sandwich loaf, crusts trimmed after filling, cut into fingers or triangles. Spreading is easier if the loaf is a day old or briefly chilled.
- YieldRoughly a quarter to a third of a cup of spread, enough for about six to eight small tea sandwiches. Made ahead, the spread firms in the refrigerator and will need a spell at room temperature before it spreads again.
Anchovy in butter is an English inheritance that American cookery took up wholesale: anchovy sauce, anchovy essence and anchovy paste were standard pantry bottles in the late nineteenth century, valued for supplying a savoury depth before anyone had a word like umami for it. The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book's sandwich chapter belongs to the age of the afternoon tea and the ladies' luncheon, when thin bread and a strongly flavoured spread were expected to be eaten standing up and in quantity. Young America was the name for a small-format mild cheddar -- a size and style designation rather than a brand -- made in the American cheese factories that spread through New York and Wisconsin from the 1850s onward; its appearance here is a reminder that Farmer wrote for cooks buying from a grocer whose stock she could assume.