Cheese Salad
Arrange one head lettuce on salad dish, sprinkle with Edam cheese broken in small pieces, and pour over French Dressing. Neufchâtel Salad I Cut cheese in dice, arrange on lettuce leaves, and garnish with radishes. Serve with French Dressing.
Neufchâtel Salad II Mash one Neufchâtel cheese and moisten with milk or cream.
Three cheese-and-lettuce variations, given in the telegraphic style Fannie Farmer used for salads once the dressing had been covered elsewhere in the book. The whole thing depends on the dressing and on which cheeses you buy.
- French Dressing means vinaigretteIn this book it is oil, vinegar, salt and pepper beaten together, in the proportion of about two parts oil to one of vinegar. It is not the sweetened orange-coloured bottled dressing that later took the name in America.
- Neufchâtel is not the French cheese hereNeufchâtel is the cheese this salad is built on -- American Neufchâtel of the period was a fresh, mild, slightly tangy soft cheese sold in small foil-wrapped cakes, close to a lower-fat cream cheese. A supermarket block labelled Neufchâtel still works; the French Neufchâtel-en-Bray, a soft cheese with a bloomy white rind, does not, and will not cut in neat dice.
- “One Neufchâtel cheese”"One Neufch tel cheese" -- The unit is a small retail cake, on the order of three or four ounces rather than a full 8 oz block; scale the quantity accordingly.
- Edam broken, not gratedThe text says broken in small pieces, giving irregular crumbles for texture against the lettuce. A young Edam breaks well; anything aged long enough to be crumbly-dry will read as too salty against the vinaigrette.
- The third variation is unfinishedAs printed here, Neufch tel Salad II stops at the mashed, cream-loosened cheese and gives no further direction; the obvious completion is to spread it on lettuce or roll it into small balls and dress it like the first two.
- Head lettuceThis means a crisp butterhead or iceberg-type head, separated into cups and left in cold water to firm up, then dried thoroughly. Wet leaves will not hold a vinaigrette.
- Dress at the tableCheese and salt-acid dressing draw water out of lettuce quickly. Pour the dressing over immediately before serving, not in the kitchen.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; one head of lettuce with 3 to 4 oz of cheese would serve about four as a first course or salad course.
Cheese salads appear in the Boston Cooking-School Cook Book at a moment when factory-made and imported cheeses were available in American cities: Edam came in its red-waxed ball, and Neufchâtel was sold in small foil cakes, both keeping well enough to sit in a household icebox until wanted. The American Neufchâtel of the 1890s was a domestic imitation of the French fresh cheese, generally traced to dairies in Orange County, New York, and it is the direct ancestor of the cream cheese that displaced it. Farmer numbers her variants — Salad I, Salad II — setting out a single technique and then ringing it through its possible changes rather than writing it out three times in full.