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Cheese Straws
5 tablespoons Gold Medal flour 1/3 cup grated cheese 1/2 tablespoon butter 1/2 cup bread crumbs 1 tablespoon milk 1/8 teaspoon salt Few grains cayenne Mix flour and seasonings, chop in butter, add the crumbs and grated cheese and mix well, add the milk to make a stiff dough, knead well; roll into a sheet one-quarter inch thick and cut into strips one-third inch wide. Bake in a moderate oven for ten minutes.
A small, very lean batch of straws — half a tablespoon of butter for the whole thing, with the cheese doing most of the enriching. A few notes before you start.
- Moderate ovenIn this period a moderate oven is usually reckoned at somewhere around 350-375F. Ten minutes at that heat will set and lightly colour strips a quarter-inch thick; watch them from eight minutes, since thin straws go from golden to bitter quickly.
- The milk is a guide, not a ruleOne tablespoon of milk will rarely bring this dough together, and the recipe says only "to make a stiff dough." Add it a teaspoon at a time beyond the first tablespoon until the mass just coheres under pressure. Too much and the straws spread and toughen.
- Grated cheese meant hard cheeseIn this period that meant a dry aged Cheddar or American "store cheese," sometimes Parmesan. Use a firm, well-aged Cheddar grated fine; pre-shredded cheese carries anti-caking starch and will make the dough dusty.
- Bread crumbsThese should be dry, finely sifted crumbs, not soft fresh ones. Half a cup of fresh crumbs weighs far less and holds much more moisture, and the dough will slump.
- Butter with flour, cold"Chop in" is the same motion as cutting fat into pastry. Keep the butter cold and work it into the flour before the crumbs and cheese go in, so it stays in flakes rather than smearing.
- Cutting and handlingRoll on a lightly floured board, trim the sheet square, then cut strips with a knife or pastry wheel and transfer them on the blade — at a quarter-inch thick they break if lifted by one end. Straws about five inches long are traditional.
- YieldThis makes a modest amount, roughly two dozen five-inch straws — enough to garnish soup for four to six. The quantities double cleanly.
Cheese straws belong to the late-Victorian and Edwardian savoury course, served with soup, salad, or at the close of a formal dinner. The version is characteristic of the flour-company cookbooks that appeared in the first decades of the twentieth century, when milling firms distributed recipe collections to encourage brand loyalty in home baking: quantities are small and the technique is pastry technique. The bread crumbs are the period's frugal touch, stretching a third of a cup of cheese and half a tablespoon of butter into a plateful.