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Cheese Biscuits
1/2 lb. cream cheese. 1/2 cup butter. 2 whole eggs. Dash cayenne pepper. 1 scant teaspoon salt.
Grate cheese, add beaten eggs, pepper, salt, also butter. Mix lightly into enough flour to make soft dough. Roll thin, cut and bake carefully until delicate brown.
A cheese short pastry served as a cracker alongside salad, written in the telegraphic style Mrs. Wilson used throughout. Two things are left to the cook: the flour quantity and the oven.
- "Cream cheese" hereThe instruction to grate it points away from a soft spreadable cheese; whatever the term meant elsewhere, the method wants a firm, dry, mild cheese that grates cleanly. A well-aged sharp cheddar or Parmesan also works and gives more flavour, though the dough will be slightly drier.
- The unstated flour"Enough flour to make soft dough" comes to roughly 1 1/2 to 2 cups for this quantity of cheese, butter and egg. Add it in stages and stop while the dough is still soft enough to gather into a ball without cracking; too much flour turns these into pale, dusty crackers.
- Mix lightlyThis is the hinge. The dough is a short pastry, and the butter and cheese should be worked into the flour only until it coheres. Kneading develops gluten and the biscuits toughen.
- Chill before rollingNot in the original, but half an hour in the refrigerator makes a dough this rich far easier to roll thin and keeps the shapes from spreading.
- Oven and timeWilson's "bake carefully" assumes a cook who watched. Use 375-400F for 8 to 12 minutes depending on thickness. High cheese and butter content means they colour fast at the edges; pull them at delicate brown, since the cheese turns bitter if allowed to go dark.
- SaltOne scant teaspoon suits unsalted butter and a mild cheese. With salted butter or Parmesan, cut it to half a teaspoon; bake one biscuit as a test before rolling out the rest.
- Yield and keepingAbout three to four dozen small rounds or straws. They crisp as they cool and keep a week in a tin; a few minutes in a warm oven restores them.
Mrs. Mary A. Wilson wrote for a Philadelphia newspaper audience in the years around the First World War, and her New Cook Book reflects a period when the formal American dinner is often said to have called for something crisp to accompany the salad course. Cheese biscuits, cheese straws and cheese wafers all belong to that slot: a short pastry made rich with cheese and butter, cut small and baked as a savoury cracker rather than a bread. The English cheese straw, generally traced to Victorian dinner-table practice, is the same idea in ribbon form, and American cookbooks of the period seem to have drawn little distinction between the two. The recipe's brevity is characteristic of Wilson, who wrote for cooks she expected to know what a soft dough felt like and how their own stove behaved.