Cheese Pastry
Ingredients.
Two ounces of Butter.
Two ounces of Flour.
Two ounces of Parmesan Cheese.
One ounce of Cheddar Cheese.
Yolk of one Egg.
The book gives quantities only, with no method, oven temperature or yield attached to them. What follows is what those proportions tell a cook, and where the pitfalls are.
- Read the proportions firstEqual weights of butter, flour and Parmesan, with an extra ounce of Cheddar and a yolk to bind. That is a short, very rich paste, closer to a cheese shortbread than to a lining pastry, and proportions of this kind are typical of period cheese straws and cheese biscuits.
- No liquidThe yolk is the only moisture. Adding water or milk to make the dough handle more easily will toughen it and drive out the crispness that is the whole point. If it will not come together, work it with the heel of the hand until the butter softens slightly, not until it is wet.
- Keep it coldWith this much fat and no water, the paste turns greasy at room temperature. Chill it after mixing, roll thin between paper, and chill again on the tray before baking so the shapes hold.
- OvenNo temperature or time is given. In modern practice a paste of this kind is baked in a moderately hot oven, around 375-400F, for roughly 8-10 minutes, until pale gold. The high proportion of cheese browns fast and burnt Parmesan is bitter, so watch the last two minutes rather than the clock.
- The cheeseParmesan then meant a hard, dry, well-aged grating cheese, and it should be finely grated so it disperses through the flour. The Cheddar of the period was firm and dry farmhouse cheese; a mild, moist supermarket block will leak fat. Use a mature Cheddar.
- SeasoningThe list omits salt and cayenne. Both appear commonly in period cheese-pastry recipes, and a pinch of salt with a small pinch of cayenne is what separates cheese pastry from plain shortcrust with cheese in it.
- WeightsThese are avoirdupois ounces, so 2 oz is about 55-60 g. Two ounces of flour is a small quantity, roughly half a cup. No yield is given in the book.
Cheese pastry belongs to the savoury course, the small salted dish served after the sweet and before dessert in British dinners of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a habit often said to have puzzled French visitors and one that largely died out after the Second World War. Cut into narrow strips it became the cheese straw, often threaded through a ring of the same paste and stood upright on a napkin; rolled and stamped it made biscuits for anchovy or cheese cream. The reliance on Parmesan is worth noting: hard Italian grating cheese had long been imported into Britain and kept far better than fresh English cheese, and it seems to have been a common choice when a dry, strongly flavoured cheese was wanted in a paste or a souffl or for depth.