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Cheese Rolls
Make a dough as for baking powder biscuit. Roll lightly with rolling pin until a little thicker than for pie crust. Spread liberally with grated cheese and roll over and over as for jelly roll. Cut the pieces about 1 inch thick. Place the cubes upright and bake ntil a light brown. Delicious with salad.
A pinwheel biscuit, written for a cook who already knows the baking-powder biscuit by heart. Everything hangs on that assumption, so the base dough and the oven heat are the two things to pin down.
- The base doughA standard biscuit of this era is about 2 cups flour, 4 teaspoons baking powder, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 4 tablespoons butter or lard cut in, and roughly 3/4 cup milk to make a soft dough. Keep it on the wet side; a dry dough cracks when rolled up.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives no heat and no time. Biscuit dough generally wants a hot oven, so roughly 425-450F is a reasonable modern setting; expect somewhere around 12 to 15 minutes, baking until light brown on top and set at the spiral.
- Thickness"A little thicker than for pie crust" means about 1/4 inch. Thinner and the cheese layer dominates and leaks; thicker and the centre stays doughy.
- The cheeseThe recipe says only 'grated cheese'; in a Canadian kitchen of this period that would most likely have been cheddar. A well-aged, drier cheddar behaves better here than a moist young block, which weeps fat and slides out of the spiral. About 1 to 1 1/2 cups.
- "Place the cubes upright"Cut side up, so the spiral faces the oven. Set them close but not touching on a greased sheet or in a shallow pan; touching sides stay soft, which some cooks prefer.
- Sealing the rollLeave a bare half-inch along the far edge and press it to the dough as you finish rolling, or the coil unwinds in the heat. Chilling the log 10 minutes makes slicing cleaner.
- Typo in the original"bake ntil a light brown" is a printer's slip for "until."
- YieldThe quantity above gives about a dozen rolls at 1 inch thick. Best eaten warm, the same hour they leave the oven.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal to sell Five Roses flour, and it treats the baking-powder biscuit as a fixed point every reader already knows, then spins variations off it. Cheese rolls are one of those variations: the jelly-roll method, familiar from sweet baking, applied to a savoury filling of grated cheddar. Cheese was an obvious choice in Canada at the time, when factory cheddar was a major export. The closing line, "Delicious with salad," suggests the era's lighter luncheon service, where a hot bread stood in for a heavier course.