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Deviled Cheese Sandwiches
American cream cheese may be mashed with a fork and to one pound add two tablespoonfuls of good brandy, onequarter of a teaspoonful of dry mustard, one-eighth of a teaspoonful of cayenne and one tablespoonful of melted butter, working all thoroughly together. When pressed into glasses and set in a cool, dry place this will keep for a month in cool, dry weather.
This is a potted cheese spread in the English manner, seasoned hot enough to earn the word "deviled." It takes five minutes to make; the only part that needs rethinking is the keeping.
- Storage is the one thing to changeButter, brandy and cayenne are mild preservatives at best, and a soft fresh cheese held a month in a "cool, dry place" is a food-safety gamble no modern kitchen should take. Pack it into jars, refrigerate, and use within about a week.
- "American cream cheese"In books of this period the phrase is genuinely ambiguous: it can mean Philadelphia-style cream cheese, or a mild young factory cheese sold as "cream cheese" because of its richness. Either works here; the block-style cream cheese gives a smoother, milder spread, a mild white cheddar a sharper one.
- Scale it downOne pound of cheese makes roughly two cups of spread, enough for two dozen small sandwiches. For a single batch, quarter everything: 4 oz cheese, 1 1/2 teaspoons brandy, a pinch each of dry mustard and cayenne, 3/4 teaspoon melted butter.
- Cayenne quantityAn eighth of a teaspoon per pound is restrained by the standards of "deviled" cookery. Add it at the start, taste, and push it further if you want the heat the name promises.
- Melted, not softened, butterMelting presumably helps the butter disperse evenly through the mashed cheese; let it cool to barely warm first so it does not soften the mixture. A food processor does the whole job better than a fork.
- "Pressed into glasses"Small tumblers or jars, packed down firmly to drive out air pockets. Traditionally a layer of clarified butter was poured over the top to seal it; that is worth doing for looks and texture even though you are refrigerating it.
- ServingSpread on thin white or brown bread with the crusts cut off, in the sandwich style this book assumes. It is stiff straight from the refrigerator, so let it sit out fifteen minutes before spreading.
"Deviled" entered English cookery in the eighteenth century to mean anything made aggressively hot with mustard, pepper or cayenne, and by 1900 it was attached to everything from crab to kidneys to ham paste. This particular formula is a descendant of English potted cheese, in which grated cheese was pounded with butter, spices and a fortified wine or spirit, packed into pots and sealed with fat -- a way of using up dry ends of cheese and keeping them through the season before refrigeration was general. Its appearance in a sandwich chapter marks the moment the technique changed purpose: American cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s carry long sandwich sections to serve the new appetite for teas, card parties, picnics and railway lunches, and old potting recipes were quietly recast as fillings.