Home › A Calendar of Dinners › Cheese Biscuits
Cheese Biscuits
4 teaspoons flour, 6 tablespoons grated Parmesan cheese, 3 tablespoons Crisco, 1 yolk of egg, 2 teaspoons cold water, salt and red pepper to taste. Mix flour and cheese; add salt and red pepper to taste. Rub in Crisco lightly. Mix yolk egg with water; add enough of these to mix flour, etc., to stiff paste. Knead till smooth on floured board, then roll out and cut into biscuits with small cutter; lay on Criscoed tin and bake in quick oven 8 to 10 minutes, or until they are a delicate biscuit color. They require to be carefully watched, as they burn easily. Parmesan cheese is best, but other dry kinds can be used. The biscuits are brittle, so always prepare more than are actually required. They rewarm well with care.
A cheese wafer in the British sense of "biscuit" — a short, crisp cracker for soup or the cheese course, not a raised American breakfast biscuit. It is a very small batch of very rich dough, and the flour quantity as printed needs a second look.
- The flour measurement is offFour teaspoons of flour cannot absorb 3 tablespoons of fat, 6 tablespoons of cheese and an egg yolk into a stiff paste. Most likely a typesetting slip for 4 tablespoons. Add flour by feel until the paste holds together and is workable rather than greasy.
- Quick ovenRoughly 400-450F. These are thin and small, so the 8-10 minutes is realistic; the warning about watching them is the one instruction that matters. They go from pale gold to bitter in under a minute.
- CriscoThe book was written to promote it, and it is still on shelves, though reformulated without trans fats. Cold butter or lard behaves the same way here and tastes better; chilled shortening gives a slightly sandier snap.
- Red pepperCayenne, not paprika or crushed chilli flakes. A pinch — an eighth of a teaspoon is plenty for a batch this size, and Parmesan already brings plenty of salt, so taste the raw dough before adding more.
- "Criscoed tin"A greased baking sheet. Parchment is easier and reduces spread; these are short enough that they will not stick to it.
- RollingRoll thin, about 1/8 inch, and use a 1 to 1 1/2 inch cutter. The dough is short and will crack rather than stretch; press scraps back together by hand rather than re-kneading, which toughens them.
- YieldRoughly 15 to 20 small wafers as written — one modest plate. The advice to make extra is sound, since a fair proportion break in handling.
- Reheating and storageTwo or three minutes in a 300F oven restores the crispness. Cool completely before storing airtight, or the cheese fat will soften them.
A Calendar of Dinners belongs to a genre of cookbook published by a manufacturer: it was written to put Crisco, introduced by Procter & Gamble in 1911, into every recipe a household might cook, which is why hydrogenated shortening turns up here in a dough an earlier English cook would more likely have made with butter or lard. The dish itself is older than the book and older than the shortening — small hard cheese wafers, flavoured with cayenne and served with soup or at the end of dinner, appear throughout nineteenth-century English and American household manuals under names like cheese straws, cheese fingers and cheese biscuits. Parmesan was the standard choice because it grates dry and does not weep fat in a hot oven; the note that "other dry kinds can be used" reflects a period when imported hard cheese was a real expense in an ordinary kitchen. The recipe uses a single yolk chiefly as a binder.