Home › Pastry › Salt and Cayenne (One dessertspoonful of Water)
Salt and Cayenne (One dessertspoonful of Water)
One dessertspoonful of Water.
Put the flour on a paste-board, sprinkle in a little salt and cayenne, and rub in the cheese, grated, and the butter; mix all these together with the yolk of an egg and the water into a smooth stiff paste. Roll this out into a strip oneeighth of an inch thick and five inches long; cut this into strips of equal sizes, also some rings.
Grease a baking-sheet, put the straws and rings on it, and bake in a hot oven ten minutes till they are a pale brown.
For serving, stand the straws through the rings like a bundle of sticks.
This is a cheese straw recipe whose ingredient list has been mangled in the original printing — only the dessertspoonful of water survived into the heading. The method is sound and standard, but you will need to supply proportions.
- The missing quantitiesThe text names flour, salt, cayenne, grated cheese, butter, an egg yolk and one dessertspoonful of water, but gives amounts for none of them except the water. A conventional Victorian cheese-straw paste runs to equal weights of flour, butter and hard grated cheese — 4 oz each is a typical working set — but that is a reconstruction, not what this page says.
- A dessertspoonfulTwo teaspoons, roughly 10 ml. It is a small amount deliberately: the egg yolk and the moisture in the butter do most of the binding, and a wet paste will spread rather than hold its edges.
- "A hot oven"The book gives no temperature; roughly 400-450F answers to the term. Ten minutes at that heat is right for a strip an eighth of an inch thick; watch from eight minutes, since the cheese browns fast and a scorched straw turns bitter.
- The cheeseIt must be a dry, hard cheese — aged Cheddar, Parmesan, or a mixture. Anything young or moist will leak fat onto the sheet and leave the straws limp and greasy.
- Keep the paste coldThis is the hinge. Rub the butter and cheese in with fingertips and stop as soon as the paste coheres; if the fat softens and the gluten develops, the straws bake tough instead of short. Chill the rolled sheet before cutting if the kitchen is warm.
- CuttingThe recipe gives neither strip width nor ring size. Strips about a quarter-inch wide and the full five-inch length work well; the rings can be cut with two round cutters, one about an inch and a half across and one an inch, to leave a band roughly a quarter-inch wide.
- The rings bake fasterThe rings -- Cut from the same eighth-inch sheet, they may colour a little ahead of the straws; watch them and lift them off early if so.
- Yield and servingYield depends entirely on the quantities you supply; a 4 oz flour reconstruction gives a few dozen straws and a handful of rings. They are best eaten the day they are baked, though they will keep a few days in a tin.
Cheese straws belong to the savoury, the small salted course that came after the sweet at a formal late-Victorian and Edwardian dinner and before the dessert of fruit and nuts. The savoury was generally understood to reset the palate for wine, and cheese pastry in various shapes - straws, biscuits, ramekins, little dariole moulds - was a reliable form because it could be made ahead and finished in minutes. The trick of gathering the straws through a ring, so they arrive on the plate like a tied bundle of kindling, is a familiar presentation of the period and turns up in a number of cookery manuals of the day. That this page has lost its ingredient list may well be a hazard of digitisation, where a recipe's quantities were often set as a separate indented block and can be split from the method that follows.