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Cheese Fingers
Cut puff paste into strips length and size of forefinger, sprinkle with a layer of grated cheese, press upon this another strip of pastry, sprinkle again with cheese and bake in quick oven.
Three lines of instruction and no numbers at all, which is typical of savoury nibbles in a flour-company book. The technique is sound; everything you need to supply is quantity, temperature and time.
- "Quick oven"425-450F. Puff paste needs that heat to convert its water to steam fast enough to lift the layers before the butter melts out. At 350F you get greasy, flat strips.
- Puff pasteStore-bought all-butter puff pastry is a fair substitute. Roll it to about 1/8 inch; the strips should be finger-length, roughly 3 inches by 3/4 inch, and cut with a sharp knife or wheel so the cut edges are not crushed shut.
- The cheese"Grated cheese" in a Canadian book of this period would most often have meant a factory cheddar, though the recipe does not say. Use a dry, sharp cheddar or a hard grating cheese; fresh mozzarella or anything wet will steam the pastry soggy from inside.
- Pressing the layersThis is the hinge. Press the second strip on firmly at the edges, ideally with a dab of water or beaten egg, or the top layer lifts clean off the cheese in the oven and you get two thin crackers instead of one filled finger.
- Chill before bakingNot mentioned, and worth doing. Twenty minutes in the refrigerator after cutting and assembling keeps the butter solid and the fingers from slumping sideways.
- TimeTen to fourteen minutes, until puffed and deep gold. The cheese sprinkled on top will scorch before the pastry is done if the sheet sits too near the top element, so bake in the middle of the oven.
- Yield and servingA 1 lb package of puff pastry with about 4 oz of grated cheese gives you at least a couple of dozen fingers, depending on how thin you roll and how much you trim. Serve them warm, the day they are baked; they go leathery overnight.
The Five Roses Cook Book was issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company, whose head office was in Montreal, to promote its Five Roses flour, and was compiled from recipes contributed by users of the flour rather than from professional kitchens. Cheese fingers are the same family as cheese straws, which appear in British and North American cookery from the late nineteenth century on, when a cheese savoury might be served after the sweet course or handed round with sherry. Puff-paste trimmings were an obvious material for them, and a scattering of grated cheddar turned them into something worth passing on a plate.