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Cheese and Currant Salad (Mash a cream cheese and mix)
Mash a cream cheese and mix with finely chopped lettuce. Shape in balls, arrange on lettuce leaves, pour over French Dressing, and over all Bar le Duc currants.
A three-line salad-course assembly from the era when a sweet preserve on cheese was still filed under "salad." Nearly everything hangs on temperature and proportion, neither of which the original gives.
- "A cream cheese"In this period cream cheese was sold as a small foil-wrapped brick or a soft Neufchatel-style cake of roughly 3 ounces. One standard 8-ounce American block is closer to two or three of them; use about 3 to 4 ounces for a salad serving four.
- Work it cold, shape it coldMash the cheese barely softened, not at room temperature, or the balls slump on the plate. Roll them, then chill 20 minutes on a plate before dressing and serving.
- How much lettuceThe chopped lettuce is a texture element, not a bulk filler. A loose half cup of very finely shredded inner leaves to 3 ounces of cheese is about right; more and the balls will not hold together.
- French DressingThe book's own version elsewhere is simply oil and vinegar with salt and pepper, mixed until it thickens; follow the proportions given there rather than a sweetened dressing. Nothing sweet and no mustard, since the currants supply the sweetness.
- Bar-le-Duc currantsA French preserve of whole red or white currants from Bar-le-Duc in Lorraine, seeded by hand and suspended in a loose syrup. It is still sold, expensively; a good whole-fruit red currant preserve, thinned with a spoonful of water, is the practical stand-in.
- Order of assemblyDress the lettuce leaves and the cheese balls first, then spoon the currants over. Reversing it turns the preserve into a syrup slick and the vinaigrette will not cling.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; on the quantities suggested above, about four small salad-course portions of one or two balls each. A light course rather than a main-plate salad.
Bar-le-Duc preserve gave this salad its whole reason for existing: a specialty of the Lorraine town of the same name, made from currants seeded one by one, traditionally with a goose quill, and generally traced back several centuries in the region. By the 1890s it was an imported luxury on American grocers' shelves and turned up in fashionable menus paired with cream cheese and crackers. The move here is to take that established restaurant pairing and file it under Salads, which tells you how elastic the salad course had become at the turn of the century: anything cold, arranged on a lettuce leaf, and dressed with oil and vinegar qualified, sweet fruit preserve and all. The chopped lettuce worked into the cheese is a small technical touch typical of the book, giving a soft cheese enough body to be shaped into balls without gelatin or a mold.