Home › Salads and Salad Dressings › Cheese and Nut Salad
Cheese and Nut Salad
1 cup cheese cup sweet cream 1 tablespoon melted buttercup chopped nuts cup chopped pimento cup chopped olives Mash the cheese, moisten with cream and melted butter, season with salt and cayenne, add chopped nuts, pimento and olives, press into a mold and let stand 2 hours. Cut in slices and serve on lettuce with mayonnaise dressing. Combine mild cream cheese with pimento, shape into small balls and serve on head lettuce with French dressing.
The ingredient list has come through the scanner badly damaged — every fraction has dropped out, and the cheese itself never made it onto the page at all. What survives is a workable method for a molded cheese loaf, and a second, simpler variation tacked on at the end.
- The missing quantitiesEach cup measure in the original now reads simply "cup" where it once carried a fraction — plausibly 1/4 or 1/2 cup of cream, nuts, pimento and olives, though there is no way to recover which. Only the tablespoon of butter survives intact. Treat them as ratios rather than absolutes: the cream and butter are there to make the cheese spreadable, and the solids appear to be roughly equal to one another.
- The cheeseIts quantity and type are both lost from the first recipe; the closing variation names "mild cream cheese," which suggests but does not prove the same cheese was intended above. A full-fat block cream cheese brought to room temperature will mash to a workable consistency.
- Melted butter is structuralMelted butter -- A tablespoon of melted butter helps the mashed cheese come together smoothly and adds a little firmness once chilled. Because the recipe calls for it melted, add it to cheese and cream that are not fridge-cold, or it will set in flecks.
- Sweet creamSimply means unsoured cream, as opposed to the sour or clabbered cream also common in kitchens of the period. Any fresh cream will do; the richer it is, the firmer the mixture.
- Drain the pimento and olivesBoth come packed in brine or liquid, and any of it carried into the mixture will keep the loaf from firming and will bleed pink streaks through it. Chop, then blot dry on a towel.
- Cayenne, not black pepperThe heat is meant to be invisible in the pale mixture. A pinch is enough; salt cautiously, since the olives bring their own.
- The two hoursThat is a minimum for a small mold in a modern refrigerator, and the loaf slices better after four hours or overnight. A loaf pan lined with plastic wrap unmolds more reliably than a fluted mold.
- Yield and servingThe original gives no cheese quantity, so no yield can be recovered; a mould built on a standard 8 oz package would serve a few people as a light luncheon course. Slice with a thin knife wiped clean between cuts, and dress the lettuce, not the cheese.
Molded cheese salads of this kind belong to the American luncheon table of the early twentieth century, when the salad course was expected to arrive in a defined shape on a leaf of lettuce rather than tossed in a bowl. The standard trio of nuts, pimento and stuffed olives turns up again and again in cheese balls, sandwich fillings and canapés. Canned pimentos in particular gave cooks a bright red note that survived refrigeration, which fresh peppers did not. The compression of the second paragraph is striking: a whole alternative recipe, the cheese-and-pimento balls with French dressing, is reduced to a single sentence as though it were an afterthought, a common habit in cookbooks of the period, where space was tight and readers were assumed to know how a salad was assembled.