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February 18
Menu: French Peas; Lamb Chops; Baked Potatoes; Artichoke Salad; Russian Charlotte Preserved Ginger; Coffee; Cheese Canapes-8 croutes bread; 14; pound cheese, 2 tablespoons Crisco,; salt and red pepper to taste, 1 tea-; spoon mustard, and 1 dessertspoon; sherry.; Cut the croutes of bread out of; slices of stale bread with a round; cutter 2 inches across. Fry the; bread a golden color in hot Crisco.; Cut up cheese; put it into a mortar; with Crisco, and pound until it; becomes a smooth paste; then season; with salt and red pepper to taste.; Add the mustard and sherry. When; all ingredients are thoroughly mixed,; put it on the croutes of bread; place; them in oven until hot through, then; serve at once.
A cheese paste on fried bread rounds, meant as a savoury course or a hot appetiser. The quantity of cheese is the one figure you have to settle before starting.
- The cheese quantityThe printed page gives a quarter pound of cheese, which is what the text now reads. That is the usual proportion for this style of canape; go by texture, using just enough fat to bind the cheese into a spreadable paste.
- CroutesA croute here is simply a round of bread, cut 2 inches across, fried until golden. Stale bread is specified because it absorbs less fat and holds its shape; day-old firm white bread is right, not soft sandwich bread.
- Crisco and substitutesCrisco was hydrogenated vegetable shortening, promoted in this book as a neutral-tasting replacement for lard and butter. Butter or a mild oil works for frying the bread; softened butter is better than shortening for the cheese paste, since it carries flavour.
- Which cheeseThe recipe names none. A firm, dry, well-flavoured cheese suits the method - aged Cheddar, Cheshire or a hard grating cheese. A young or moist cheese will slump into grease rather than a paste.
- Skip the mortarGrating the cheese finely and beating it with the fat gives the same smooth paste in a fraction of the time; a food processor does it in seconds.
- Mustard and sherryA teaspoon of mustard here is most likely dry mustard powder, though the text does not say so. A dessertspoon is about two teaspoons; add the sherry last and slowly, since too much liquid will loosen the paste and it will run off the bread in the oven.
- Oven and timingThe recipe gives no temperature, only "until hot through". A hot oven for a few minutes, until the cheese is glossy and beginning to bubble at the edge, is enough; longer and the fat separates and the bread hardens.
- YieldEight croutes serve four as a small first course, or more as a savoury at the end of a meal. They must go to the table straight from the oven; they are poor once cooled.
Cheese canapes of this kind descend from the English savoury, the small hot salt course served after the sweet at Victorian and Edwardian dinners - close cousins to Welsh rarebit and to the cheese ramekin. The seasoning tells you the lineage: dry mustard, cayenne and a spoonful of sherry were the standard trio for hot cheese in British cookery, and they are generally said to have crossed into American entertaining menus more or less intact. Its appearance in a Crisco cookbook is straightforward commerce. The Story of Crisco was published by Procter & Gamble in the 1910s to teach cooks that the new hydrogenated shortening could stand in for lard in frying and for butter in almost everything else, so recipes like this one are written to put Crisco into two separate jobs in a single short dish.