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Cheese Balls
To cream cheese add a dash of Tabasco, a pinch of salt, enough paprika to give it a pink color, and cream to make a paste. Form into small balls and roll in finely chopped black walnuts. Serve with lettuce and French dressing.
A salad-course canapé with no quantities given at all, which is normal for this kind of book — the proportions are meant to be judged by feel. A working ratio is 8 oz cream cheese to about 2 tablespoons cream, a scant teaspoon paprika, and roughly 3/4 cup finely chopped nuts.
- The hinge: add cream a teaspoon at a timeThe paste has to be soft enough to smooth out but stiff enough to hold a ball. Overshoot the cream and there is no fixing it except by adding more cheese, so stop while the mixture is still firmer than you think you want.
- Chill before rollingForm the balls, refrigerate them 20-30 minutes until firm, then roll in the nuts. Rolling soft cheese in chopped nuts drives the nuts into the surface and smears the coating.
- Cream cheese has changedModern block cream cheese contains gums and stabilizers and is generally stiffer than the fresher, looser cheese of the period, which may be part of why the original calls for cream at all. Whipped or tub-style cheese is already softened and will need little or no liquid.
- Paprika "to give it a pink color"Use sweet Hungarian or plain sweet paprika, not smoked and not hot, since the heat is supposed to come from the Tabasco. About a teaspoon per 8 oz tints the cheese without tasting of pepper.
- Black walnutsJuglans nigra, not the common English walnut — much stronger, almost resinous, and sold mainly shelled in bags or online. English walnuts or pecans work but give a milder, sweeter result.
- French dressing meant vinaigretteIn American cookbooks of this era French dressing is oil, vinegar, salt and pepper, whisked or shaken — not the sweet orange bottled dressing the name later came to mean.
- Yield and service8 oz of cheese makes roughly sixteen to thirty small balls depending on how large you roll them, enough for about six as a salad course. Dress the lettuce and set the balls on top; dressing poured over them washes the nuts off.
- Nothing left over about itDespite its place in the left-over bread chapter, the recipe uses no bread. If you want to honour the heading, serve the balls on rounds of stale bread toasted dry, or roll them in fine dried crumbs mixed with the nuts.
Cheese balls rolled in chopped nuts belong to the great age of the American "salad course" — roughly 1890 to 1930 — when a small, highly seasoned, sculpted thing set on a lettuce leaf with vinaigrette was the mark of a properly served luncheon. Tabasco, made in Louisiana since the 1860s, and paprika, whose arrival in American pantries is often linked to Hungarian cooking, were both fashionable seasonings at the time, and paprika seems to have been used for colour as much as for flavour. Black walnuts were widely gathered across much of the eastern and midwestern United States, often collected rather than bought. Left-over cookery books like this one appeared in numbers around the First World War, when domestic thrift was being argued as a civic duty; the appearance of this recipe under "Left-Over Bread", despite containing no bread, suggests the compiler was filling a chapter as much as solving a problem.