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Cream-Cheese Salad
Mix an equal amount of cream cheese and chopped nuts well together. Add a little finely minced parsley. Form into balls the size of small English walnuts and set away to chill. When ready to serve the salad, dress a platter of crisp white lettuce leaves that have been well dried, with enough French dressing (see page 73) to moisten. Lay the cheese balls on the lettuce and serve at once.
Cream cheese spoils very quickly, so any leftovers of it should be kept very cold and utilized within twenty-four hours.
Cream Cheese on Crisp Crackers Take any unsweetened crackers. If they are not very crisp, put them on a flat baking tin and set in a moderate oven for a few minutes. Spread with beach-plum or Bar-le-Duc jelly, and drop a small teaspoonful of cream cheese in the center of each cracker.
Two small assemblies rather than cooked dishes, and both depend almost entirely on the quality and temperature of the cheese. A few of the terms have shifted since the book was written.
- What "cream cheese" meantAt this date the term covered a fresh, unripened soft cheese, often made without the gums or stabilizers used later, and in some cases closer to a farmer's cheese or French-style Neufchatel than to the firm block sold today; packaged brands were also available by this period. Modern block cream cheese works, but it is stiffer; let it soften slightly before mixing, then chill hard again to shape.
- The keeping note is realThe instruction to use leftover cheese within twenty-four hours suits a fresh cheese without the stabilizers and long shelf life of the modern product. Today's pasteurized cream cheese keeps far longer in the package, but once mixed with nuts and parsley and handled into balls it should be treated as a same-day item and kept refrigerated until the moment of serving.
- Proportions and yieldThe recipe says only "an equal amount"; taken by volume, 8 oz of cheese to roughly a cup of chopped nuts gives a stiff, workable mixture, enough for several salad servings. The nuts are unspecified; walnuts or pecans suit the mixture.
- Chill before shaping, not afterThe mixture is easier to roll if it goes back into the refrigerator for twenty minutes once combined. Formed balls need a further half hour cold to hold their shape against the dressing.
- French dressingIn American books of this era this is a plain vinaigrette -- oil and vinegar, commonly around two to three parts oil to one of vinegar, with salt and pepper, shaken -- not the sweetened orange-colored bottled product of later decades.
- Dress at the last minute"Moisten" is the operative word. Lettuce must be bone dry or the dressing slides off, and the cheese balls should be laid on after the leaves are dressed, or they pick up oil and slump.
- Moderate ovenFor crisping the crackers, 350°F for three to five minutes, then cool them completely on a rack. Warm crackers will melt the cheese into a smear.
- Bar-le-Duc and beach plumBar-le-Duc is a French currant preserve from the town of that name, traditionally with the seeds picked out by hand; it is a specialty import and expensive. Beach plum jelly is a New England coastal product, tart and dark. Red currant jelly is the closest everyday substitute for either.
Both items belong to the era when cream cheese moved from a farm product to something an American cook could buy reliably, and when the composed salad " — lettuce, a dressing, a small formed garnish — was becoming standard at ladies' luncheons. The pairing of fresh cheese with a sharp red jelly was a fashionable one, and Bar-le-Duc in particular carried a note of imported luxury; it is often said to have served, in American entertaining books of the period, as a marker of a well-stocked pantry. Beach plum jelly, offered here as its equal, is the domestic counterpart, made from a shrub that grows in coastal sand and was gathered rather than bought.