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Pailles au Parmesan à la
Yarmouth. (Cheese Straws.) Ingredients.
Half a pound of short Paste.
One ounce of grated Parmesan.
Cayenne. Ground Mace.
This is an ingredient list rather than a full method — the book assumes a cook who already knows how cheese straws are made. The quantities are usable; the technique has to be supplied.
- Half a pound of short pasteHalf a pound is about 225 g of made short paste — pastry already mixed, not eight ounces of flour. A plain short paste of flour, butter at about half the weight of the flour, a little salt and cold water would suit.
- One ounce of Parmesan is not muchAbout 30 g to 225 g of pastry gives a restrained, savoury straw rather than the cheese-heavy versions common now. Modern formulas often use two to three times as much cheese.
- Cayenne and mace, unmeasuredBoth are meant as seasonings worked into the paste with the cheese. A large pinch of cayenne and a smaller pinch of ground mace suit this quantity. Mace is the outer covering of the nutmeg seed, warmer and less sweet, and it appears alongside cheese in some Victorian and Edwardian savouries.
- The missing methodThe book gives no method, so this is a reconstruction: roll the seasoned paste to about 3 mm, cut into strips roughly 10 cm by 1 cm, lay on a baking sheet and bake in a hot oven — around 425F — for 8 to 10 minutes, until pale gold. They colour fast at this thinness.
- What "à la Yarmouth" signalsYarmouth in period savouries generally points to the bloater — smoked herring — often in the form of a pounded paste. No fish appears in the list as printed, so either the book expected it from the name or the entry is incomplete. If you want the dish the title promises, work a teaspoon or so of bloater or anchovy paste into the pastry with the cheese.
- Yield and serviceHalf a pound of paste gives several dozen straws, depending on how thinly it is rolled. Savouries were served hot at the close of dinner, after the sweet, and straws were sometimes bundled through a pastry ring.
Cheese straws belong to the late-Victorian and Edwardian savoury — the small hot, salty course served after the sweet and before dessert fruit, a fixture of English dinners that has no equivalent in French service. Their French-sounding titles, as here, follow a familiar pattern: pailles au parmesan is simply "Parmesan straws," dressed in the kitchen French that any high-class establishment used on its menus. The "à la Yarmouth" tag points to Great Yarmouth on the Norfolk coast, then the centre of the English herring trade and the source of the bloater — a lightly salted, cold-smoked herring whose paste flavoured a whole family of period savouries, from canapés to devilled toasts. Recipes of this kind seem to have been written for cooks who already knew their trade: the ingredient list was a reminder, not a set of instructions.