Cheese Straws
Roll out plain or puff-paste until one fourth of an inch thick. Spread one half with grated cheese; fold over and roll again. Repeat the process three or four times; then cut into strips and bake. Serve with soup or salad.
A pastry-scrap recipe written for cooks who always had puff paste on hand. The instructions omit oven heat and time entirely, which is where most of the guidance is needed.
- Oven heatThe recipe gives no oven heat at all; a hot oven, somewhere around 400-425F, suits pastry this thin. Straws this thin need roughly 8 to 12 minutes; pull them when the edges are deep gold, since the cheese browns faster than the pastry.
- Which cheese"Grated cheese" here is most likely a dry, sharp cheese such as Parmesan or a well-aged Cheddar. Avoid anything young and moist; the water content softens the paste and prevents the layers from lifting.
- Keep the dough coldThis is the hinge. Three or four rolls and folds with cheese between them will warm the butter and the fat will merge into the flour instead of steaming into layers. Chill the paste 20 to 30 minutes after every second fold.
- Rolling thicknessA quarter inch is the starting thickness. After the final fold, roll out to about an eighth of an inch before cutting, or the straws will puff into pillows rather than crisp sticks.
- CuttingStrips of roughly 1/3 inch wide and 5 inches long are a common size. Giving each a twist before it goes on the sheet helps hold the shape.
- SeasoningThe recipe gives none, but cheese straws of this period often carried salt and cayenne, sometimes a little dry mustard. Scatter it with the cheese at each fold rather than all at once.
- Yield and keepingThe recipe specifies no quantities, so yield depends entirely on how much paste you start with. They are best the day they are baked; refresh in a 300F oven for a few minutes to bring back the snap.
Cheese straws are associated with the savoury course of the late Victorian and Edwardian table, the small salted dish served after the sweet or, as here, alongside soup and salad. Puff paste is made in quantity and always leaves trimmings, and trimmings rolled with grated cheese bake into something worth serving. A separate and better-known American Southern cheese straw is a short, crumbly dough of cheese, butter and flour pressed through a cookie press, which shares the name but not the method.