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Pounded Cheese
Chop about one pound of good dry cheese, place it in a mortar with three or four ounces of butter, and pound to a smooth paste. Mix with it one teaspoonful each of made mustard, ground spice and curry powder, and one-half teaspoonful of black pepper. Stir one wineglassful of sherry into the mixture. Next cut some slices of bread about a quarter of an inch in thickness, cutting each slice into halves lengthwise; spread the cheese mixture over them, and sprinkle a little cayenne pepper over each. Arrange them on a dish over which has been an ornamental paper, or a folded napkin, and serve. The cheese mixture can be kept in a cool place for several days, if pressed down into jars and covered with paper.
This is English potted cheese, dressed up for the Waldorf's savoury course. It is a blender recipe now, and the only real decisions are the cheese and how hard you push the spice.
- The mortarA food processor does the whole job in about a minute. Have the butter properly soft and the cheese grated or cut small, and stop while it is still a paste rather than a warm emulsion.
- "Good dry cheese"A firm aged Cheddar, Cheshire, Lancashire or Gloucester, ideally a piece that has dried a little at the edges; potted cheese is often described as a way of using up the hard end of a truckle. Avoid anything young, waxy or pre-shredded with anti-caking starch.
- Made mustardPrepared mustard from the jar, not dry powder. An English-style mustard is the likeliest reading, though the book does not specify.
- "Ground spice"Genuinely ambiguous. In period English potted cheese the spice is commonly mace, sometimes allspice or nutmeg; a teaspoon of ground mace is a safe reading and a characteristic flavour.
- WineglassfulAround 2 fl oz, a quarter cup. That plus 3-4 oz butter is what makes the paste spreadable, so add the sherry last and in stages — cheeses vary in how much liquid they will take before the mixture breaks.
- Seasoning orderA pound of aged cheese carries a good deal of salt already. Mix, taste, then adjust; the black pepper, curry powder and the cayenne on top stack up quickly.
- The breadUntoasted thin bread was the period service, but the paste is firm and drags. Thin toast or plain crackers hold up better, and the slices should be cut and spread shortly before serving or they go leathery.
- Keeping itRefrigerate rather than trusting a cool larder, in a jar with a layer of clarified butter poured over the surface, and use within a week or two. The paper cover in the original is not a seal by modern standards.
- YieldAbout a pound and a half of paste — enough for forty or fifty small fingers of bread. Halve it unless you are feeding a crowd or want a jar to keep.
Potted cheese belongs to the English larder tradition of pounding a leftover ingredient with butter and fortified wine so it will keep: potted beef, potted shrimps, potted cheese. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English cookery books give it constantly, usually with mace and sack or sherry, and it survived into the Victorian and Edwardian dinner as part of the savoury — served after the sweets and before the fruit, when the port came out. Oscar Tschirky, whose 1896 book collected the working repertoire of the Waldorf, would have needed such things for a New York clientele that took its dinner conventions from London; the ornamental paper doily and the folded napkin in the last line are a commonplace of period cookery writing, turning a thrifty scrape of dry cheese into something a waiter could carry into the dining room.