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Cheese Rolls
12 slices bread, cut very thin 1/2 cup grated cheese 1/2 teaspoon salt shake of cayenne 1/2 cup butter Cream butter, add cheese, salt and pepper and spread on bread. Remove crusts. Place each slice on damp towel and roll carefully as for jelly roll. The butter should keep slice from unrolling, otherwise fasten with toothpicks. Place in slow oven until brown and crisp, turning occasionally.
A rolled hot canapé of the bridge-party era, and one that depends almost entirely on the bread. Everything else is a matter of temperature and patience.
- The hinge: fresh, soft breadOnly a soft, fine-crumbed sandwich loaf sliced very thin will roll without cracking. Day-old or artisan bread with an open crumb will split along the fold; if your slices resist, flatten each one with a rolling pin first.
- The damp towelLaying the slice on a damp cloth relaxes the crumb so it bends instead of breaking. A minute or two is enough — a soaked slice will tear and the butter will not seal it.
- "Slow oven"In period usage roughly 300F, though cookbooks of the era place a slow oven anywhere from about 250F to 325F. At that heat the rolls crisp through rather than browning on the outside while staying soft in the middle; timing will vary with the oven and the thickness of the bread, so watch them and turn once or twice as the recipe directs.
- Grated cheeseThe recipe specifies nothing beyond "grated cheese." A firm, dry, sharp cheese will behave best here; anything young and moist will weep fat and loosen the roll. Grate it fine so the spread stays smooth.
- Salt and butterHalf a teaspoon of salt with half a cup of butter and a sharp cheese is generous by current palates. If your butter is salted, cut the added salt by half and taste the spread before it goes on the bread.
- Sealing the rollSpread the butter mixture right to the edges, particularly the far edge, and roll snugly. Toothpicks work but leave holes; chilling the shaped rolls seam-side down for 20 minutes sets the butter and usually makes them unnecessary.
- Yield and servingTwelve rolls, enough for four to six as a hot appetiser. They are meant to be eaten warm; they soften within an hour and can be re-crisped briefly in the oven.
- Make-aheadThe rolls can be assembled, wrapped and refrigerated for several hours before going into the oven.
Rolled bread sandwiches, baked or toasted, were a fixture of American entertaining from roughly the 1910s through the 1940s, when the afternoon bridge table and the buffet supper created demand for small hot things that could be shaped in advance and put in the oven when guests arrived. Their spread owed something to commercial as well as culinary developments: the uniformly soft, fine-crumbed loaf turned out by industrial bakeries and, from the late 1920s, the machine-sliced loaf -- though a recipe calling for bread "cut very thin" still suggests slicing by hand. Creamed cheese-and-butter mixtures of this sort were also used for cold canapes in the same period.