Soft cheese in the context of "Dip (food)"

The butter knife is a table knife intended for serving butter and applying it to bread and crackers ("spreading"). These utensils are also used for soft cheese, pâté, and moulded jelly when the more specialized knives are not available.

During the Victorian era, a multitude of knife-like implements were invented to handle butter. The Victorians distinguished:

A dip or dipping sauce is a common condiment for many types of food. Dips are used to add flavor or texture to a food, such as pita bread, dumplings, crackers, chopped raw vegetables, fruits, seafood, cubed pieces of meat and cheese, potato chips, tortilla chips, falafel, and sometimes even whole sandwiches in the case of jus. Unlike other sauces, instead of applying the sauce to the food, the food is typically placed or dipped into the sauce.

Dips are commonly used for finger foods, appetisers, and other food types. Thick dips based on sour cream, crème fraîche, milk, yogurt, mayonnaise, soft cheese, or beans are a staple of American hors d'oeuvres and are thicker than spreads, which can be thinned to make dips.