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Cheese Salad
Put the yolk of a hard-boiled egg into a basin, and rub it smooth with a tablespoonful of salad oil; then add one teaspoonful of salt, one of cayenne and one of sugar, and made mustard, mixing each one separately, before another is added, and stirring in one-half pound of grated cheese. The cheese used for this purpose should be as old as possible without being high. After all are well worked together add one tablespoonful of onion vinegar, put the mixture into scallop shells, and serve with shredded lettuce, or other green salad.
This is a potted-cheese spread served as a salad course, not a tossed salad. It comes together in a bowl with a fork in about ten minutes, and the whole character of it depends on the cheese.
- Cut the cayenne backA full teaspoon of cayenne in half a pound of cheese is punishing by modern palates, and a full teaspoon of salt is unnecessary with an aged cheese that is already salty. Start with a quarter teaspoon of each, taste, and build up.
- The hinge: one seasoning at a timeThe instruction to mix each addition in fully before the next is not fussiness. The yolk and oil are being worked into a smooth paste that has to carry the cheese, and adding everything at once makes it harder to get an even mixture.
- "As old as possible without being high""High" here means rancid or ammoniated. Oscar wants a well-aged hard cheese with bite: a two-year Cheddar, aged Cheshire, or dry Gruyere. Avoid soft or bloomy-rind cheeses, which will not grate and will read as spoiled in this mixture.
- Onion vinegarA Victorian pantry item, rarely sold now. Steep a peeled, sliced small onion in a cup of cider or white wine vinegar for a few days and strain. A tablespoon of plain vinegar plus a scraping of grated onion gets you close.
- Salad oilIn 1896 this usually meant olive oil, though cottonseed oil was also sold as salad oil in America by then. Any neutral or light olive oil works; a strongly peppery modern oil will fight the cayenne.
- Made mustard'Made' mustard is prepared mustard paste rather than dry powder. An English prepared mustard suits the period; the recipe gives no quantity, and a teaspoon is a reasonable starting point.
- Scallop shellsThese were standard tableware for individual portions of hot or cold savouries. Small ramekins, shallow butter dishes, or a single crock with crackers alongside all serve the same purpose.
- Yield and servingHalf a pound of cheese makes four to six small portions. It firms up considerably in the refrigerator, so let it sit twenty minutes at room temperature before serving on the shredded lettuce.
Oscar Tschirky ran the dining rooms of the Waldorf, and his 1896 Cook Book catalogues the full late-nineteenth-century restaurant repertoire, savouries and salads included. A cheese paste like this belongs to the English tradition of potted cheese, in which grated aged cheese was pounded with butter or oil, mustard and cayenne, packed into pots and kept for weeks; the hard-boiled yolk here does the work of binding that butter usually did, and gives a lighter result suited to a salad course. Serving it in scallop shells is often said to have been common hotel practice of the period, when individual portions of anything creamy or gratinated arrived in a real or silver-plated shell. The onion vinegar is the most dated element: flavoured vinegars, steeped with shallot, tarragon, garlic or celery seed, are generally thought to have been kept as a matter of course in a well-run kitchen and stood in for the bottled condiments a cook would reach for now.