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Cream Cheese and Nut Balls
Mix cream cheese with chopped celery and olives, form into balls about the size of a large hickory nut. Roll each ball in chopped nut meats, English walnuts being preferred. Arrange on lettuce leaves and serve with French dressing and guava jelly.
A four-line salad course that depends entirely on texture: firm cheese, crisp celery, crunchy walnut. The only real technique is keeping the cheese cold enough to hold a ball.
- The cheeseIn this period "cream cheese" meant any fresh unripened soft cheese sold in bulk or in small foil-wrapped bricks, closer to Neufchatel than to today's stabilized block. Modern full-fat block cream cheese works; whipped or tub-style spreads have too much air and water to shape.
- Work it coldMash the cheese just enough to fold in the celery and olives, then chill the mixture 20-30 minutes before rolling. Warm cream cheese smears rather than balls, and the walnut coating slides off.
- Size of a large hickory nutAbout an inch across, roughly a tablespoon of mixture. Expect 16-20 balls from an 8 oz package of cheese, which serves four to six as a salad course.
- OlivesGreen brine-cured olives, stuffed or plain, are the likeliest reading; the recipe says only "olives." Chop and blot them dry, and taste before salting the mixture, since the olives carry much of the seasoning.
- French dressingA period French dressing is a plain vinaigrette shaken to order, roughly three parts oil to one of vinegar with salt and pepper, not the sweet orange bottled version that took the name later in the century.
- Guava jellyA bright, tart-sweet tropical jelly, associated with the Cuban trade and with Florida growers, and available in American groceries at the time. It is still sold in Latin and Caribbean markets. The recipe says only "serve with," so a spoonful alongside is the natural reading. Red currant jelly is a workable substitute.
- AssemblyDress the lettuce and plate it just before serving. Vinaigrette collapses lettuce leaves within a few minutes, and the walnut coating goes soft once wet.
This is a characteristic Edwardian "fancy salad" of the sort American cookbooks devoted whole chapters to between about 1890 and 1930: cold, moulded, small, and built for looks on a lettuce leaf rather than for appetite. The pairing of a savory cheese ball with sweet jelly reflects a period fashion for fruit accompaniments to the salad course, and guava jelly in particular was a fixture of American grocery shelves thanks to the Cuban and Floridian trade. Hickory nuts, invoked here purely as a unit of size, were a familiar native nut that the recipe then sets aside in favor of the more genteel English walnut.