Cayenne Cheeses
INGREDIENTS for sufficient for 6 persons. -4 oz. of butter, lb. of flour, 4 oz. of grated cheese, teaspoonful of cayenne, 1/2 teaspoonful of salt; water. AVERAGE COST, 10d.
Rub the butter in the flour; add the grated cheese, cayenne and salt, and mix these ingredients well together. Moisten with sufficient water to make the whole into a paste; roll out, and cut into fingers about 4 inches in length. Bake them in a moderate oven a very light colour, and serve very hot.
TIME.-15 to 20 minutes.
SEASONABLE at any time.
These are cheese straws under an older name, and they behave like a very short pastry: handle them as little as possible and they will be crisp rather than tough.
- The flour quantityThe weight of flour has dropped out of the ingredient list and cannot be recovered with certainty. The surviving "lb." points to a quarter or a half pound, so 4–8 oz against the 4 oz of butter is the plausible range; the higher figure gives a paste that is easier to roll.
- The cayenne quantityThe fraction before "teaspoonful of cayenne" is missing. A quarter teaspoon in this quantity of paste already gives a pronounced heat; a full teaspoon would be fierce by modern palates. Start low and taste the raw paste on a fingertip.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350F/180C. The instruction to bake them "a very light colour" is the real control — pull them when they are set and barely blond, as the cheese browns and turns bitter quickly.
- Timing15 to 20 minutes suits fingers rolled fairly thick. Thin straws in a modern oven will be done in 10 to 12 minutes, so check early.
- The cheese"Grated cheese" here means a dry, hard, well-flavoured cheese — a mature Cheddar or a hard grating cheese. A young, moist cheese leaks fat and the fingers spread and soften.
- WaterAdd it a teaspoon at a time. The butter and cheese supply most of the binding; too much water develops the gluten and the fingers come out leathery instead of short.
- Yield and servingRoughly 24 to 30 four-inch fingers depending on thickness. They were served hot as a savoury at the end of dinner, or with soup; they also keep a few days in a tin and crisp again in a low oven.
Cayenne cheeses belong to the Victorian and Edwardian savoury course, the small salty dish that came after the sweet and before dessert fruit at a formal English dinner — a slot that also gave us anchovy toast, devilled biscuits and cheese ramakins. Cayenne, a ground capsicum pepper whose name is generally traced to a Tupi word for the pepper, with the spelling later influenced by the place name, had been a standard English store-cupboard spice since the eighteenth century and was used chiefly to make cheese, potted meat and sauces "piquant". The mixture is the direct ancestor of the modern cheese straw, and the shift from a dinner savoury to a cocktail nibble followed as the savoury course itself fell out of use.