A characteristic British potted cheese that Eugene Walter calls ‘cheese spread’ & claims for the American south.

Walter so loved the south that he had a pronounced propensity to claim any preparation he liked, like this one, for the region.

• 1 lb chopped up good sharp Cheddar
• 2 generous Tablespoons unsalted butter
• 2 Tablespoons minced chives
• a splash of brandy
• some hot sauce
• 1 Tablespoon Creole or Dijon mustard
• 3 Tablespoons Fino or Amontillado Sherry
• 6 minced scallions

Blast everything in a food processor until smooth, pot and chill overnight: Serve at room temperature.

Notes:

-Walter harbored any number of eccentricities endearing and exasperating. One of them, choose how to categorize it, was his insistence on the use of what he calls “rat-trap cheese,” any cheap American supermarket ‘Cheddar,’ for use in all recipes incorporating… cheese.

Walter on the subject:

“About that cheese. We always say Cheddar when we write down recipes like this, but it is not that great English cheese to which we refer. That is served at cheese time after a meal, with very fine wine. What this dish calls for is what we used to call, in old southern recipes… rat-trap cheese. That is, any of the deep yellow or orange-colored cheeses from Wisconsin, Oregon, Minnesota, New York State, etc., which has a delightful musty-musky cheese flavor all its own.”

-Take this as you may in terms of culinary efficacy but, unlike many of his pronouncements on southern culture culinary and otherwise, Walter did not make this one up. ‘Rat-trap cheese,’ like Velveeta, was and is the preferred ‘cheese’ of a certain subset of traditional southern kitchens to use instead of more expensive varietals for cooking. The lurid color of either rat trap or Velveeta is a big part of the appeal.