Beat the yolks of 2 eggs with ¼ pound of butter; add a pinch of salt and pepper, a teaspoonful of mustard and 5 ounces of grated Swiss cheese. Mix well with ¼ pound of flour or enough to make a stiff dough; roll out and cut into round biscuits. Bake in a moderate oven for twenty minutes, and serve.
A savoury cheese biscuit in the British sense — a firm, short cracker to eat with drinks or at the end of a meal, not a raised American breakfast biscuit. The dough is essentially a cheese shortcrust, so the hinge is keeping it cold and not overworking it.
- The weights¼ pound of butter is one US stick (115 g), ¼ pound of flour is a scant cup (115 g), and 5 ounces of grated cheese is roughly 1½ packed cups. The flour is deliberately given as a guide — add it until the dough is stiff enough to roll, which may take a little more.
- Moderate oven350°F (175°C). Twenty minutes suits rounds rolled about ¼ inch thick; anything thinner will be done and browning at the edges by 12 to 15 minutes, so watch rather than trust the clock.
- What "Swiss cheese" means hereGruyère or Emmental, dry and well aged, not the mild pre-sliced supermarket product sold under that name. A young, wet cheese will loosen the dough and make the biscuits greasy.
- The mustardA teaspoonful of mustard in a book of this kind most likely means dry English mustard powder, added with the salt and pepper. Prepared jarred mustard adds liquid the dough does not want.
- Working the doughCream the butter and yolks first, then work in cheese and flour only until it comes together. Chilling the rolled sheet for twenty minutes before cutting gives cleaner rounds and less spread in the oven.
- YieldPerhaps two to three dozen biscuits at a 2-inch cutter, depending how thinly they are rolled. They keep about a week in a tin and are better crisped for a couple of minutes in a warm oven before serving.
Cheese straws, cheese wafers and "cheese biscuits" of this kind were a fixture of late-Victorian and Edwardian dining, served with the savoury course or with wine after dessert, and many general cookbooks of the period carry a version. Calling them Swiss is more likely a matter of the cheese than of Swiss cookery: Gruyère and Emmental were among the hard foreign cheeses available in English and American shops by this date, and their name on a dish suggested a firm, nutty, keeping cheese. Books like this one, which set out a dish a day from a different country, leaned heavily on that kind of shorthand — a national label attached to whatever single ingredient marked the dish as foreign.