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Potted Cheese
Cut about a pound of Cheshire cheese into dice, and put these in a mortar with six ounces of butter, two tablespoonfuls of finely-powdered sugar and one teaspoonful of mace; then pour over four or five wineglassful of sherry, and after it has stood for two or three minutes to soak, pound all well together. Work it into a smooth paste, and place it in jars, putting clarified butter over the top.
A potted cheese in the old English style: a spreadable paste of grated cheese, butter and fortified wine, sealed under fat. It needs almost no technique, but the liquid quantity and the storage advice both want attention.
- The wine is the hingeFour or five wineglassfuls is roughly 8 to 10 fluid ounces for one pound of cheese, which will give a paste closer to a dip than something you can spread. Add two ounces, pound, and judge from there.
- WineglassfulIn late nineteenth-century American and English books a wineglass is reckoned at about 2 fluid ounces (a quarter cup), not the size of a modern wine glass.
- Cheshire cheeseA crumbly, salty, faintly acidic cow's-milk cheese. A firm English Cheshire or a dry Lancashire is closest; a young Cheddar will work but is denser and sweeter, so cut the sugar.
- Finely-powdered sugarSugar ground fine in the period sense, i.e. caster or superfine. Modern confectioners' sugar contains cornstarch and will dull the flavour slightly, though it dissolves well enough here.
- MaceA full teaspoon of ground mace to a pound of cheese is assertive by current taste. Half a teaspoon is a safer starting point, and mace loses its perfume fast once ground, so buy it recently.
- Mortar or processorA food processor does the pounding in under a minute. Grate or crumble the cheese rather than dicing it, have the butter properly soft, and pulse so the mixture emulsifies instead of warming into a greasy mass.
- The butter seal, and storageClarified butter poured over the top excludes air and was the period's method of keeping the pots for weeks in a cold larder. Treat it now as flavour and short-term protection only: refrigerate the jars, use within about a week, and keep the surface unbroken until you start a pot.
- Yield and servingRoughly 2 pounds of paste if all the sherry goes in, less if you hold it back; enough for a dozen or more people as a savoury. Bring it to cool room temperature before serving with dry toast, water biscuits or celery.
Potting was England's standard way of holding a rich food under a cap of fat, and cheese joined shrimps, beef and game birds in the practice by the eighteenth century, when cookery books printed versions using Cheshire or Gloucester pounded with butter, sack or sherry and warm spice. It belongs to the tradition of the savoury, the small sharp course that closed a British dinner after the sweet, which is why it turns up in a New York hotel book at all: the Waldorf of the 1890s, where Oscar Tschirky presided as maitre d'hotel, is often said to have served a clientele that expected French service with English habits attached, and a jar of potted cheese sat comfortably at the end of such a meal or on a supper tray. The mace and sugar look odd now but are entirely of a piece with older English spicing, where sweet and savoury were not kept so firmly apart.