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Cheese Straws
¾ cup grated cheese ½ cup butter 1 teaspoon sugar ½ teaspoon salt Pinch of cayenne pepper 1 teaspoon nutmeg 1 egg 2 tablespoons sweet cream 1¼ cups Five Roses flour.
Mix all other ingredients, then add flour. Roll out and cut 6 inches long by ¼ 1/4 inch wide. Bake in moderate oven.
A short, rich cheese pastry from the small-cakes chapter — closer to a savoury shortbread than to the puff-pastry straws sold today. The dough is soft and needs handling like pie crust.
- Keep everything coldWith half a cup of butter to 1¼ cups flour, the dough turns greasy and unrollable at room temperature. Chill it at least 30 minutes before rolling, and chill the cut straws again on the sheet if the kitchen is warm.
- "Moderate oven"Roughly 350–375°F. Straws this thin will likely need only 10 to 12 minutes — pull them when the edges are just golden, as the cheese browns and turns bitter quickly.
- The cheeseAn early-twentieth-century Canadian household would most likely have meant a firm aged Canadian cheddar. Use a dry, well-aged cheddar and grate it finely; young or pre-shredded cheese carries moisture and anti-caking starch that slacken the dough.
- The nutmegA full teaspoon in this quantity of dough is assertive by modern taste and will dominate the cheese. A quarter teaspoon reads as warmth rather than spice cake; freshly grated is worth the trouble either way.
- "Sweet cream"Simply cream that has not soured — heavy or whipping cream. Not sweetened.
- FlourFive Roses was milled from hard western wheat and was stronger than most modern all-purpose flour. Ordinary all-purpose flour is a fair substitute here; if the dough seems slack, add a tablespoon more rather than more liquid.
- Cutting and sizeRoll about ⅛ to ¼ inch thick and cut with a knife or pastry wheel into strips 6 inches by ¼ inch. Six-inch straws are fragile — transfer them on the blade of a long knife or roll the dough directly on the parchment and lift away the scraps.
- Yield and keepingYield depends entirely on how thin the dough is rolled; expect several dozen. They crisp as they cool and keep about a week in a tin; a few minutes in a low oven revives them.
Cheese straws belong to the late-Victorian savoury course, the small salted bite served after the sweet or with soup and sherry, and they crossed readily into North American home baking as a party and tea-table item. Their placement here among the small cakes is worth noting: rolled, cut and baked goods were often grouped with the cookies in flour-company cookbooks of the period, whether or not they were sweet. The recipe also advertises its sponsor — Five Roses was the flour of the Lake of the Woods Milling Company, and the cookbook was distributed to sell it, which is why the flour alone is named by brand. The teaspoon of sugar and the nutmeg alongside cayenne reflect an older habit of seasoning savoury pastry with warm spice.