Cheese Balls
1½ cups grated mild cheese 1 tablespoon flour ¼ teaspoon salt Few grains cayenne Whites 3 eggs Cracker dust Mix cheese with flour and seasonings. Beat whites of eggs until stiff, and add to first mixture. Shape in small balls, roll in cracker dust, fry in deep fat, and drain on brown paper. Serve with salad course.
A fritter of grated cheese bound with beaten egg white, fried and served alongside salad. The whole thing hinges on keeping the mixture cold and the fat hot enough to set the crust before the cheese melts out.
- Fat temperatureThe recipe gives none; for deep fat of this kind aim for roughly 375F. Cooler than that and the balls slump and leak cheese into the oil; they need only a minute or two, until the crumb coat is golden.
- Mild cheeseA young, mild American cheddar of the sort a household cook of the period would have bought: a mild, well-melting yellow cheese. A medium cheddar, Monterey Jack or a mix of the two works; skip aged cheeses, which weep oil, and pre-shredded bags, which are dusted with anti-caking starch.
- Cracker dustFinely rolled soda or common crackers. Pulse plain saltines or unsalted water crackers to a fine sandy crumb; panko is coarser and gives a different, spikier crust.
- SaltA quarter teaspoon is right for this volume of cheese, and worth tasting against whatever cheese you use — much modern cheddar is saltier than the mild cheese intended here.
- Handling the mixtureFold the stiff whites in rather than stirring, then chill the bowl 20-30 minutes. Cold, lightly packed balls of about a rounded teaspoon hold their shape; larger ones burst.
- DrainingBrown paper meant grocer's wrapping. Use a rack set over a sheet pan, which keeps the crust from steaming soft as paper towel tends to do.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no yield; expect roughly two dozen small balls, depending on how you size them, to accompany the salad course. They are only good hot, within a few minutes of frying.
Cheese balls of this kind belong to the late-nineteenth-century American "entrée" — not a main course but a small hot made dish served between the heavier courses or, as here, with salad. Cookery books of the period are full of these fried morsels, and they may reflect two things about the time: what looks like a professional cooking-school interest in what beaten egg white could be made to do, and the arrival of cheap, uniform factory cheddar from creameries in New York and Wisconsin, which plausibly gave a household cook a reliable mild cheese to grate. The technique is essentially that of a soufflé fritter, and the same batter logic turns up in cheese soufflés and croquettes.