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Cheese
Creamed cheese with chopped nuts, olives or peppers, or a combination of these. Sliced cheese with salad dressing or mustard on rye bread. Cottage cheese with onions and cream or salad dressing used with brown bread. Pimento may also be added.
Add India relish to well-seasoned fresh cottage cheese. Add chopped English walnuts to cottage cheese. This will make a dark filling but a good flavor.
Chopped parsley, cottage cheese and salad dressing.
Date combination.
This is a list of sandwich fillings rather than a formula, and it assumes a cook who knows what a spreadable consistency looks like. A few of its terms have drifted since the book was written.
- "Creamed cheese"Not necessarily cream cheese in the modern branded sense. It means any soft cheese worked smooth with a fork and a little milk or cream until it spreads; cream cheese or a mild fresh cheese does the job directly.
- "Salad dressing"In American cookbooks of this period this often means boiled dressing, a cooked mixture of egg, vinegar, mustard and milk, or else a bottled commercial salad dressing where one was to hand. Mayonnaise is the nearest thing on a modern shelf and will be slightly less tart.
- India relishA sweet-sour chopped vegetable pickle, mustard-forward, close to what is now sold as chow-chow or mustard piccalilli. Sweet pickle relish is the easiest substitute but is milder.
- PimentoSweet red peppers packed in brine or oil, not a hot chile. A drained jar of roasted red pepper, chopped fine and blotted dry, keeps the filling from going watery.
- "Date combination"The book gives nothing further. A plausible reading is chopped dates worked into cottage or cream cheese, sometimes with nuts, on brown bread, but that is inference; treat it as a suggestion rather than an instruction.
- ProportionsFor a workable spread, allow roughly a quarter cup of chopped additions to a cup of cheese, and dressing by the tablespoon until it holds together. Cottage cheese benefits from being drained or pressed first, or the bread turns to paste by noon.
- The walnut noteThe book warns the filling will look dark. Walnut skins are usually blamed for tinting fresh cheese greyish as it stands; the flavour is unaffected, and toasting or skinning the nuts is said to reduce the effect.
- PackingThese are fresh-cheese fillings with no acid preservation to speak of. They were meant for a lunch carried a few hours in a cool season; today they want an insulated box and a cold pack.
The Metropolitan Cook Book was distributed free to policyholders by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, part of the insurance-sponsored health-education work of the early twentieth century, and its interest in what went into a lunch box was arguably as much actuarial as culinary: better-fed workers and schoolchildren made better risks. Cottage cheese features heavily because it was promoted in this era as a cheap, high-protein substitute for meat, a campaign that gained force during the First World War when federal food administrators pressed it on households as a patriotic economy. Whether the use of rye and brown bread rather than white reflects the same advice-giving is a guess. What the page does not offer is quantities, which is common in the sandwich sections of general-purpose books of the period; fillings were treated as a matter of taste and of using up what was in the icebox rather than as measured recipes.