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Roquefort Cheese Sandwich
After grating two ounces of Roquefort cheese, work it into a paste with one ounce of butter, using for the purpose a knife, and season with salt and pepper. When it is quite smooth, spread the paste on some slices of bread, cover with another one, press the two carefully together and cut into fingers. If desired, chopped parsley, or chives, or both, may be mixed with the cheese. It may also be spread on crackers in place of bread. It is generally served as a course after salad.
A savoury sandwich in the older English sense: served late in the meal rather than at lunch. The whole thing hinges on the butter, which must be soft enough to take the cheese without being oily.
- ProportionsTwo ounces of Roquefort to one ounce of butter is roughly 1/2 cup crumbled cheese to 2 tablespoons butter. That 2:1 ratio gives a paste stiff enough to spread thinly without tearing soft bread.
- "Grating" a blue cheeseRoquefort is too moist and crumbly to grate in the modern sense. Crumble it fine with your fingers or press it through a coarse sieve, then mash with the knife as directed.
- Butter temperatureThe butter must be at room temperature, near mayonnaise consistency. Warmed or melted butter will separate from the cheese and leave a greasy paste that soaks into the bread.
- Go carefully on the saltRoquefort carries a great deal of salt already. Season with pepper first, taste, and add salt only if the paste is flat.
- The breadUse a fine-crumbed white sandwich loaf, sliced thin, crusts trimmed after assembly. Coarse artisan bread with large holes will not press together or cut cleanly.
- Cut into fingersThree or four strips per sandwich, about 3/4 inch wide. Press the assembled sandwich under a plate for a few minutes before cutting; a serrated knife wiped between cuts keeps the edges neat.
- Yield and timingThis quantity spreads three to four sandwiches, or nine to sixteen fingers. The paste keeps several days covered in the refrigerator, but bring it back to spreading temperature before using.
- Where it belongs in the mealOscar's note that it follows the salad places it as a savoury, the small salty course served late in an English-style dinner, typically around the sweet course. The recipe gives no portion; two or three fingers per person is a reasonable serving.
Roquefort, made from sheep's milk and ripened in the limestone caves at Roquefort-sur-Soulzon in southern France, was one of the imported luxuries that defined an American hotel kitchen at the turn of the twentieth century, and Oscar Tschirky's Waldorf traded heavily on exactly that sort of cachet. Its placement here, as a course after the salad, reflects the Anglo-French service order that grand hotels followed: a small, sharply flavored savoury closing the savory portion of a long dinner, a convention generally traced to English dining habits and largely gone from American tables by the mid-century. The technique itself is the old one for potted or worked cheese, in which a firm cheese is beaten into butter to make it spreadable and to keep it a few days longer than the cheese alone would last.