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Cheese Straws No. 3
1 cup flour 1/4 cup butter 1/4 teaspoon salt 1/2 cup ice water 1 ounce of cheese Make plain pastry of the flour, butter, salt and ice water. Roll the pastry out to one-fourth inch in thickness. Spread one half of it with grated cheese. Press the edges firmly together. Fold again, and roll to one-fourth inch in thickness. Sprinkle one half with cheese, and proceed as before. Repeat this process once more. Cut into strips about five inches long and one-fourth inch wide. Bake in quite a hot oven about eight minutes.
A rough-puff pastry rolled and folded around grated cheese three times, then cut into ribbons. The technique is sound; only the water quantity and the oven description need translating.
- The water is the one figure to distrustHalf a cup of ice water to one cup of flour is far more than a pastry of this kind will take. Add the water a spoonful at a time and stop as soon as the dough holds together — in practice around 2 to 3 tablespoons. The half-cup may be the amount to have chilled and standing by rather than the amount to use.
- Quite a hot ovenRoughly 400 to 450F. Eight minutes at that heat suits quarter-inch straws; they should be pale gold and firm, and they will darken quickly past that point.
- Plain pastryMeans shortcrust: cut the butter into the salted flour until it looks like coarse crumbs, then bind with the ice water. Do not work it smooth.
- What the folding is doingThree rounds of spreading, folding and re-rolling is rough puff lamination with cheese standing in for some of the butter. Keep the dough cold between rounds — ten minutes in the refrigerator if the butter starts to show through — or the layers merge and the straws bake dense.
- The cheeseOne ounce is about a quarter cup grated, divided across three foldings, so each layer gets very little. Use a dry, hard, well-flavoured cheese — Parmesan, aged Gouda or a firm aged cheddar. A young moist cheese will weep fat into the layers.
- Cutting and shapingQuarter-inch strips are fragile; a pizza wheel or long knife in a single downward press cuts more cleanly than a sawing motion. Twisting each strip before it goes on the sheet is a familiar treatment for cheese straws, though this recipe does not ask for it.
- YieldRoughly two to three dozen five-inch straws from this quantity, which is one bowl of nibbles rather than a party platter. They are at their best the day they are made, recrisped briefly in a warm oven if needed.
Cheese straws belong to the late-Victorian and Edwardian savoury — the small salted course served after the sweet at a formal dinner, alongside anchovy toast and devilled biscuits — and they survived the collapse of that course by turning into something handed round with drinks. The appeal to a thrifty cookbook writer is the ratio: an ounce of cheese, laminated through a cup of flour, flavours far more than an ounce of cheese eaten plainly. The numbering of the recipe indicates only that other versions of it appear elsewhere in the same book. The pastry method is the same rough puff a cook would already have known for jam turnovers.