Classic cheese ball

The cheese ball is an American party food classic. It’s a little retro, but retro food is fun, and a cheese ball is the kind of thing you can easily posh up and adapt to use your favourite cheeses, herbs, and seasonings.

In its original incarnation, the classic cheeseball contained cream cheese, fairly boring cheddar (typically the pre-shredded stuff you buy in a packet), onion, pimento, and Worcestershire sauce, all of which were mixed together, shaped into a ball, and rolled in chopped nuts.

In recent years, however, there’s been a revival of the cheese ball with clever cooks taking advantage of more thoughtful flavour combinations like feta and pine nuts and blue cheese and dates. When you use good cheese and experiment with herbs, spices, dried fruits, and toasted nuts, a cheese ball can become more than the sum of its parts.

I’m sharing below the recipe for my family’s classic cheese ball. Use it as a starting point for riffing. I recommend always including the cream cheese as it’s pretty essential for binding the ingredients. But do try swapping out the cheddar for other favourite cheeses, adding herbs and spices, rolling in herbs instead of (or in addition to) the nuts.

In the picture shown I’ve used a combination of cream cheese and Wensleydale cheese with chopped cranberries, rolled in toasted pistachios.

Classic Cheese Ball

• 200g cream cheese
• 200g cheddar cheese, grated (feel free to swap it for other cheese or a combination of cheeses)
• 1 tbsp finely chopped green pepper
• 1 tbsp chopped pimento
• 2 spring onions, finely chopped
• 2 tsp Worcestershire sauce
• 1 tsp lemon juice
• a pinch of salt and pepper
• chopped pecans

Method

1. Mix together the cream cheese and cheddar until well blended (you can use a food processor for this). Add all of the other ingredients except pecans and stir until combined.
2. Chill for 30 minutes then shape into a ball (it might help to put all of the mixture in clingfilm and use that to shape your ball). Roll the ball in the pecans. Serve with crackers (always crackers!).

What to drink: Given cheeseball is party food I recommend party wine with it. A soft juicy red like a merlot or a sauvignon blanc would both work well

Stichelton, pear and walnut salad

A perfect seasonal salad from Jeremy Lee’s gorgeous book Cooking to use the Christmas Stilton or as Jeremy suggests, Stichelton. I love the touch of using membrillo in it and, if you can get hold of it, quince vinegar.

Jeremy writes: "This pleasing salad is best in the winter months when walnuts, pears and Stilton are at their peak. It is worth keeping an eye out for interesting varieties of pears such as Passe-Crassane, so distinctive with their stalks topped with a drip of red wax.Colston Bassett is a pasteurised Stilton, the only Stilton permitted, and Stichelton is unpasteurised, and made from the last culture taken from the last unpasteurised Colston Bassett Stilton that was stored and preserved by Randolph Hodgson at Neal’s Yard Dairy.

Stichelton, pear and walnut salad

Feeds 6

2–3 ripe pears

1 soup spoon very good vinegar (you can get quince vinegar from the Vinegar Shed)

250g Stichelton or Colston Bassett Stilton or any good blue cheese

75g membrillo or quince cheese

100g walnuts, coarsely chopped

3 big handfuls of mixed leaves such as escarole, soft green lettuce, rocket, spinach, chicory or even watercress

3 soup spoons walnut oil

2 soup spoons extra virgin olive oil

Halve and core the pears, then slice thinly. In a big bowl, toss the pears in the vinegar to prevent discoloration. Crumble the Stichelton over the pears.

Cut the membrillo into small pieces and scatter over the Stichelton, then strew with the chopped walnuts. Add the leaves,a little salt and black pepper and the walnut and olive oils. Mix together, taste for seasoning and serve.

What to drink: So not port, for a start, even though it's Stilton! I'd be tempted by a rich white like a grenache gris or a white Côtes du Rhône. An amontillado sherry would also be rather delicious.

Extracted from Cooking Simply and Well, for One or Many by Jeremy Lee, published by Fourth Estate at £30.

St John's Welsh rarebit

If you're a fan of the iconic St John in Smithfield you'll have no doubt had their rarebit at some point and here's how to make it (if you can work out what 'a very long splash' of Worcestershire sauce is!)

The recipe comes from the recently published The Book of St John which is a glorious tribute to the restaurant and its founders Fergus Henderson and Trevor Gulliver.

While including impressively precise instructions it's also an utter joy to read. "When it comes to eating, irrigation channels are essential". LOVE it!

Welsh Rarebit

To serve at least 4, depending on the dimensions of your toast

Welsh Rarebit is a noble version of cheesy toast. Everyone loves cheesy toast! Our Rarebit is a proud thing and, if we might say so, extremely popular. So it is odd that Fergus gleaned this recipe from a chef who had previously worked at Buck’s Club, which was well known at the time for selling the worst rarebit in London.*

A knob of butter

1 tablespoon plain flour

1 teaspoon English mustard powder

1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper

A very long splash of Worcestershire sauce, and a bottle to serve

200ml Guinness

450g mature strong Cheddar cheese, grated

4 pieces of toast

Melt the butter in a pan, stir in the flour, and let this cook together until it smells biscuity but is not browning. Add the mustard powder and cayenne pepper, stir in the Worcestershire sauce and the Guinness, then gently melt in the cheese. When it’s all of one consistency, remove from the heat, pour out into a shallow container, and allow to set.

Take a piece of good white bread and toast on both sides. Allow to cool just a little, then cover one side with the rarebit mixture to about 1cm thick – if you find that it doesn’t spread with ease, press it on with your fingers. Put on a baking sheet and place under the grill until golden and bubbling – grilling to just beyond your comfort threshold, to allow the flour to cook out.

When it comes to eating, irrigation channels are essential: make a gentle criss-cross pattern on your hot rarebit with a knife, creating the perfect flood plain for the Worcestershire sauce.

* There is another thing that we might add, if you are amused by a little mathematics. At St. JOHN Smithfield we sell an average of forty-five Welsh Rarebits per day. Taking into account annual closures, in this, our twenty-fifth year, we will have sold somewhere in the region of 405,000 rarebits. By the time we are thirty we will have surpassed the half-million mark. Onward!

What to drink: Given that it includes Guinness it seems perverse to drink anything else though there are, of course, better stouts and porters out there. A generous grenache or GSM blend should also work. FB

Extracted from The Book of St John by Fergus Henderson and Trevor Gulliver (Ebury Press, £28 hbk) Photography by Jason Lowe

Spicy cheese straws

It is absolutely worth making these addictively moreish, light crumbly cheese straws which were served at my son Will’s pub The Marquess Tavern back in the noughties and which I included in my book An Appetite for Ale (which you can currently pick up for an absurdly low price on Amazon.)

Serves 6-8

150g plain flour

1/4 tsp cayenne pepper or hot pimenton

1/4 tsp mustard power or 1/2 tsp Dijon mustard (see method)

A pinch of sea salt

100g chilled, unsalted butter cut into small cubes

150g strong, mature farmhouse cheddar, coarsely grated

1 egg yolk

Sift the flour with the cayenne pepper, mustard and salt and tip into the bowl of a food processor (or just a bowl if you’re going to make it by hand)

Add the cubed butter to the flour and pulse to amalgamate (or rub it in with your fingertips). Add the grated cheese and pulse or rub in again. Beat the egg yolk with 2 tbsp water - and the Dijon mustard if you haven’t any mustard powder) and add just enough to the mix to enable you to pull it together and shape into a flat disc. Wrap in clingfilm and refrigerate for at least 30 minutes than remove the dough and allow it to come back to room temperature. Preheat the oven to 190°C/160°fan/Gas 5

Roll out the dough fairly thinly (I find it easiest to divide it into two halves) and cut into long strips. (Don’t cut off the uneven ends - that’s what makes them look homemade.) Lay the strips carefully on a couple of lightly greased baking sheets and bake for about 12-15 minutes until golden brown. Leave on the trays for 10 minutes then transfer to a wire rack to finish cooling. Eat fresh, ideally but they will keep well for a couple of days in an airtight tin and you can refreshing them briefly in the oven.

What to drink: Originally designed to go with a classic pale ale but a gutsy red like a rioja or malbec will work pretty well too.