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Cheese Straws
1 t salt. 1½ C flour 1 t baking powder Cold water Paprika 8 T lard ¾ C grated cheese 2 T butter Sift together flour, salt and baking powder. Work in lard lightly. Add just enough cold water to make a dough. Chill. Roll out 1/4 inch thickness. On one half sprinkle 4 T of grated cheese, dash of paprika and dot with butter. Fold dough over, press edges together and repeat two times. Cut in straws or small shapes. Bake 15 minutes in oven Mrs. S. C. Kimball.
A rough-puff pastry folded with cheese rather than a mixed cheese dough, typed up with the usual church-cookbook shorthand and at least one mangled fraction. A few gaps need filling before you start.
- The cheese quantityThe printed page reads ¾ cup grated cheese, as our text now gives, which matches the method's 4 tablespoons per fold over three foldings. Use about 3 ounces of a dry, sharp cheese — aged cheddar or Parmesan — grated fine so it does not tear the layers.
- Missing saltThe method says to sift salt with the flour but the ingredient list omits it. Use ½ teaspoon; with unsalted lard and a salty cheese, that is the right range.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given, which is common in community cookbooks of this kind. Cheese straws of this thickness want a hot oven, 400–425°F, for the stated 15 minutes; lower and the fat is more likely to leak out before the layers set.
- Lard and butterEight tablespoons is half a cup, a full stick's worth. Modern shortening or an all-butter version both work, but lard gives the short, flaky crumb the recipe is built around and stays firmer during rolling.
- Keep everything coldThis is the hinge. It is a laminated dough — chill after mixing, and chill again between folds if the kitchen is warm. Fat that softens into the flour gives crackers instead of straws.
- The folding"Repeat two times" means three cheese layers in all, each time sprinkling one half, dotting with butter, folding, and pressing the edges shut. Roll back out to ¼ inch after each fold.
- Cutting and yieldStraws are traditionally about ½ inch wide and 4–5 inches long. This quantity of dough gives roughly four to five dozen; they crisp as they cool and keep a week in a tin.
Cheese straws came into American cookbooks from English savoury cookery, where cheese fingers were served at the close of a formal dinner or with soup, and they settled into the repertoire of ladies' luncheons, teas and church suppers. Their placement among the sweets says more about the compilers' filing than about the dish. The reliance on lard rather than butter for the bulk of the fat is typical of a home kitchen of the period, where lard was rendered at home and cheap while butter was the more valuable commodity, spent sparingly as the dots between the folds.