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Cheese Sandwich
The usual cheese sandwich consists of slices of cheese between slices of buttered bread. For an unusual sort of sandwich, the cheese is first broken, then mashed and mixed with cream, to a smooth paste. Season with paprika and salt. Cut the bread in thin oblongs and spread with the cheese. Put the sandwiches together and press them so that they will not easily fall apart. Melt two ounces of butter in a pan, and when it is hot, brown each sandwich slightly on both sides. These must be served immediately. Very delicious sandwiches are made by mixing cream cheese with finely chopped walnut meats and with this, spreading dainty slices of white bread.
Three sandwiches in one entry: a plain cheese sandwich, a fried one filled with a cheese-and-cream paste, and a cold cream-cheese-and-walnut spread. Only the fried one needs any real translation.
- Which cheeseThe book names no cheese, so a plain firm cheese of the sort then sold by the piece is the likely intention. Anything that mashes and melts well works; a well-aged cheddar or a young Gruyere both mash smoothly with a fork once at room temperature.
- "Cream" means liquid creamIn the fried sandwich, cream is the liquid dairy used to loosen the mashed cheese into a paste, not cream cheese. Start with a tablespoon per cup of grated cheese and add more until it spreads without tearing the bread.
- Two ounces of butterFour tablespoons, and that is for a batch, not a single sandwich. Use enough to film the pan, add more between batches, and keep the heat at medium so the butter browns the bread rather than burning before the cheese softens.
- Thin oblongsSlice the bread thinner than a modern sandwich loaf, roughly a quarter inch; the recipe says nothing about crusts either way. Thin bread is what lets a brief pan-fry heat the filling through; thick slices will brown outside and stay cold in the middle.
- Press before fryingThe pressing is structural. Press firmly, then weight the sandwich in the pan with a second pan or a flat lid so the paste bonds the two slices and the sandwich does not slide apart when turned.
- Serve immediatelyThis is the hinge of the fried version. A pan-fried cheese sandwich left standing steams itself soft and the crust goes leathery within a couple of minutes.
- Cream cheese for the walnut spreadHere cream cheese does mean the soft fresh cheese; commercially packaged cream cheese was available by this period, though the book does not specify a source. Chop the walnuts fine enough that they do not tear the thin bread, and taste before salting.
- YieldThe quantities are left to the cook. Roughly six ounces of cheese and a couple of tablespoons of cream fill four thin sandwiches, cut into oblongs for eight to twelve pieces.
Sandwiches occupy their own chapter in many turn-of-the-century American cookbooks, a period when the tea table, the picnic basket and the packed lunch pail all wanted food that held together in the hand. This entry shows a range in a single paragraph: a plain slice-of-cheese sandwich, a fried version that anticipates the grilled cheese of later decades, and thin bread with cream cheese and walnuts. Commercial cream cheese had become widely available in the United States in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, which may help account for the number of spread sandwiches in books of this period. Paprika appears frequently in American recipes around 1900, often for the color it gave a pale filling as much as for heat.