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Other Cheese Combinations
Grate raw carrots and combine them with cottage cheese in the proportion of half carrot and half cheese. Season with mayonnaise, form into balls and serve on lettuce with French dressing. Dates are good stuffed with cream cheese. Tomatoes also may be stuffed with cheese.
Three suggestions rather than one recipe, and all of them assemble in minutes. The proportions are the only real instruction, and they need adjusting for modern dairy.
- Cottage cheese has changedThe cheese here was probably drier and more firmly drained than much of what is sold now, though creamed cottage cheese was also available in this period. Supermarket creamed cottage cheese is wetter, and an equal-parts mix with grated carrot may slump rather than form balls. Drain it in a sieve for twenty minutes, or use dry-curd or farmer cheese.
- Grate the carrot fineOn the coarse side of a box grater the shreds stay stiff and the balls fall apart. The fine holes give a damp, almost pulpy shred that binds with the curd.
- Mayonnaise and French dressing bothNot a duplication. The mayonnaise is the binder worked into the cheese mixture, no more than a tablespoon or two per cup; the French dressing here means the plain oil-and-vinegar type, spooned over the lettuce at the table.
- Cream cheese for the datesBring a block to room temperature and beat it smooth before piping or spooning into pitted dates.
- Stuffed tomatoesHollow small tomatoes, salt the insides and invert them on a rack for fifteen minutes so the shells drain, or the cheese filling turns watery on the plate.
- Yield and servingA cup of drained cheese with a cup of grated carrot makes something on the order of a dozen to twenty walnut-sized balls, a salad course for about four; the recipe itself gives no yield. Chill the balls thirty minutes before plating; they firm up considerably.
The Metropolitan Cook Book was produced by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company and given free to policyholders, part of a broad early twentieth-century campaign in which insurers promoted nutrition and hygiene as a way of keeping their customers alive. That purpose is visible in a page like this one: raw grated carrot and cottage cheese were the sort of food the dietary advice of the 1920s and 1930s favoured, cheap protein and raw vegetables, presented in the salad-course idiom that middle-class American tables had adopted. Moulding soft cheese into balls and setting them on a lettuce leaf was a common presentation of the era, when a salad was often expected to arrive as a composed object rather than a tossed heap, and the stuffed date with cream cheese proved among the more durable of these small conceits, surviving on party trays long after the carrot balls were forgotten.