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Cream Cheese Salad
Arrange crisp lettuce leaves on a salad dish, and press cream cheese through a potato ricer upon them. The cheese must be kept on the ice at least six hours bebefore making this salad, and it should be served immediately. Use French dressing. Pass Bar-le-Duc, or guava jelly or strawberry jam with it.
Barely a recipe in the procedural sense, but the details that matter are all about temperature and texture. Cold cheese and a ricer are the whole technique.
- The hinge: cheese hard-coldSix hours on the ice means the cheese must be thoroughly firm before it goes near the ricer. Cheese at room temperature smears and clogs the holes instead of extruding in clean threads; straight from a cold refrigerator, ideally with 20 minutes in the freezer first, it comes through as a light nest.
- "Cream cheese" in 1911"Cream cheese" in this period -- Full-fat block cream cheese of the Philadelphia type was already widely sold, and is the most likely reading here, though period recipes sometimes meant a soft homemade fresh cheese. Whipped or tub cream cheese has too much added water and gum to rice; use a plain foil-wrapped block.
- Potato ricerA ricer or a coarse food mill both work. A drum sieve pushed through with a plastic scraper gives the same effect, and a rotary cheese grater is a reasonable substitute for the appearance.
- French dressingIn this period the phrase usually means oil, vinegar, salt and pepper whisked together, roughly three parts oil to one of vinegar; some period versions add a little mustard or paprika, but sugar is not part of it. Modern bottled "French dressing" is a sweet orange-red emulsion and is not the same thing.
- Serve immediately, and mean itRiced cream cheese slumps back into a mass fairly quickly as it warms. Dress the lettuce, rice the cheese over it and carry the dish to the table.
- Bar-le-DucA jelly from Bar-le-Duc in Lorraine, made with whole white or red currants seeded by hand. Any tart currant or redcurrant preserve stands in; guava jelly and strawberry jam are the book's own alternatives and remain good ones.
- Quantity and yieldNo amounts are given. Figure about 1 oz of cheese per person over two or three lettuce leaves, so a standard 8 oz block dresses six to eight small salad plates.
This belongs to a distinct genre of early twentieth-century American salad: soft fresh cheese, crisp lettuce, an oil-and-vinegar dressing and a sweet preserve passed separately, served as its own course in the French manner rather than alongside the meat. The pairing of cream cheese with Bar-le-Duc jelly was a hotel and club fixture of the era, and it appears in cookbooks of the 1900s and 1910s as a mark of a fashionable table; the imported Lorraine currant jelly, seeded currant by currant with a goose quill according to the traditional account, carried a good deal of prestige for the money. The instruction to keep the cheese "on the ice" is a reminder that the Butterick book was written for households with an icebox rather than mechanical refrigeration. The potato ricer is used here purely for looks, which tells you something about how much presentation mattered in the salad chapters of the period.