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Cheese Shell Filled with Creamed Cabbage
A small head of young cabbage should be boiled in salted water until tender. Drain, chop, and season it. There should be two cups. Put it in an empty Edam or pineapple cheese shell in alternate layers with one cup of white sauce No. 2 (see page 68). Heat in the oven until the sauce bubbles. This will give the cabbage a delicate cheese flavor. Boiled macaroni or rice may also be reheated in cheese shells to advantage. Cheese Sticks (from Pie Crust) When there is not enough crust for another pie, roll it thin, cut in strips about three inches long and one inch wide. Moisten the edges and spread with a little snappy cheese. Roll up and press the outer edge well down. Brown lightly in the oven.
Two thrift ideas in one entry: a hollowed cheese rind used as a baking dish, and pastry scraps turned into cheese straws. Both work, but the first needs a cheese that no longer arrives in the same form.
- The cheese shellThis means the empty wax-coated rind of a whole Edam, or the hard netted rind of a pineapple cheese, scraped out and used as an ovenproof bowl. Whole Edam balls are still sold; a hollowed rind holds a couple of cups at most and will soften and slump in a hot oven, so keep the heat moderate (around 375F) and set it on a tray. If you cannot get one, an individual gratin dish with a little grated hard cheese is a reasonable substitute, though the flavour will not be quite the same.
- Pineapple cheeseNot cheese with pineapple. It was a firm American cheese cured in a net that left a diamond-patterned, pineapple-like rind, hung and rubbed until the outside was hard as a shell. It is essentially unavailable now.
- White sauce No. 2Numbered white sauces in books of this period usually run from thin to thick, so No. 2 is most likely a medium sauce: roughly 2 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons flour cooked together and whisked into 1 cup milk, seasoned with salt and pepper. Check page 68 for the book's own version. Make it a little thin, since it will tighten in the oven.
- Boil the cabbage brieflyA young head chopped small needs 5 to 8 minutes in salted water, not the long boil the period took for granted. Overcooked cabbage releases sulphur compounds and turns the finished dish grey and sour-smelling.
- Drain it hardThe hinge of the dish. Press the chopped cabbage in a sieve or wring it in a towel before layering, or the water it gives up in the oven will thin the sauce into a puddle at the bottom of the shell.
- Head sizeA small young head of about 1 lb yields roughly the 2 cups called for once boiled and chopped. That fills one Edam shell and serves two as a light supper dish, or four alongside a roast.
- Heating timeAbout 20 minutes at 375F, until the sauce bubbles at the edges. Nothing here is raw, so you are only heating through and browning the top.
- Cheese sticks"Snappy cheese" means a sharp aged cheddar or a potted cheese spread. Bake the rolled strips at around 400F for 10 to 12 minutes, watching them; the pastry is thin and the recipe asks only for a light browning.
This entry belongs to the early twentieth-century American genre of the "left-over" cookbook, a form often associated with the food-conservation campaigns of the First World War, when using up remnants was framed as a civic virtue as much as domestic economy — though whether this particular book sits in that moment is not established here. The cheese shell trick depended on how cheese was then sold: whole Edam balls in red wax and netted pineapple cheeses arrived intact at the grocer and were cut down at home, leaving a rigid rind that a cook naturally treated as free crockery. Pineapple cheese is generally traced to Connecticut in the early 1800s, where the curd was pressed in a net and hung to cure, giving the hard cross-hatched shell the name describes; it faded as factory cheese moved to blocks and wheels. That the same page also rescues scraps of pie crust as cheese straws shows the book's logic plainly enough: nothing that came into the kitchen was allowed to leave it unused.