Beer + cheese = love.
If you've looked on my recipes page you may notice that I have a bit of a love affair with beer and cheese. On their own I love them in their own right. Together, they just work so well (when paired correctly — you can really make some bad combos here!) and I like to spend time putting beers and cheese together, because I'm cool and that's a legit hobby. My latest pairing is for a beer cheese dip based on a recipe in Columbia cooks, a vintage cookbook based on Columbia recipes published by the Heathwood Hall Parents Guild in 1960.
I found this one in a pile at an antique store with the cover torn off, and it has a lot of great recipes, with some that you see in all vintage cookbooks, but plenty of them are unique, delicious ones that I look forward to making tons more of. I have seen many copies of this floating around antiques stores in Columbia if you want one of your own.
Like most vintage recipes, the original was puzzling and required some research to figure out how to make this one happen in a way that honored the original. Let me show you the original recipe before we go any further and we'll puzzle over how I started with this recipe (lower lefthand corner) and came to the one I'm sharing with you today.
The first ingredient is the myst puzzling. What is a glass of Vera-sharp cheese? Google was not helpful here. Is it this soft blue cheese? That doesn't look like it comes in a glass, so maybe not. This vintage Borden cheese ad for Vera-sharp cheese says "Cheddar flavor" and it comes in a glass, and it fits the flavor profile that we expect from beer cheese. So I went with a sharp cheddar in my recipe.
And the recipe here also only recommends not quite a half glass of flat beer. What kind of beer though? As someone who has made a lot of beer + cheese recipes, I like brown ales with my cheddar cheeses, for the most part. I picked up Hi-Wire's Bed of Nails brown ale because it's what was at my nearby grocery store. I usually head to Craft & Draft for my beer cooking needs but sometimes time is of the essence. Soon though, I want to make this Columbia recipe with a Columbia-made beer, it only makes sense!
Bed of Nails Brown Beer Cheese Spread
Ingredients
- 16 ounces sharp cheddar grated
- 8 ounces Neufchatel cheese softened
- 1 tbsp lemon juice
- 4 cloves garlic minced
- 4 shakes Crystal or Tabasco sauce
- 6 ounces Bed of Nails brown ale
- salt and pepper to taste
Instructions
- Put the cheeses, lemon juice, garlic, half of the beer, and hot sauce in a food processor.
- Begin blending and immediately start pouring in the rest of the beer to keep the cheese mixture blending into a paste.
- Add a little more beer as needed to get the consistency you want, which should be a chicken-salad thick paste to an easy spreadable paste (like mayonnaise).
- Add salt and pepper to taste, or more hot sauce if desired.
- Spread on crackers, on bread, or on vegetable crudites.
Do you want to know a sekrit?
I went specifically looking for a spread or dip recipe to make because I found this awesome ceramic dish at HomeGoods on a recent lunch break trip there, and I really wanted to show it off on here. I wanted to use it so badly, I sat down with my vintage cookbooks, looking for inspiration for recipes just to use this thing. It's awesome for showcasing recipes here, it's awesome for parties, and to be awesome, it's fantastic when you want to have a dip for dinner kind of night.
