Home › Salads › Cheese Dishes Served with Salads (Press the edges together)
Cheese Dishes Served with Salads (Press the edges together)
and press the edges together closely. Fold again to make three layers, turn half-way round, pat and roll out to the thickness of one-fourth an inch.
Sprinkle one half with cheese and proceed as before. Continue rolling and adding the cheese, until, to one cup and a half of flour, from half to a whole cup of cheese has been used. After the last rolling, cut into bands half an inch wide, or into rings and straws one-fourth an inch wide. The straws and bands should be four or five inches in length, and the rings large enough to hold three or four straws. Serve the bands piled in log-cabin style on a doylie-covered plate. If the paste be made expressly for the straws, the cheese and cayenne may be mixed into the flour with the butter, thus diminishing time in making. Bake in a moderate oven until delicately browned.
Gnochi à la Romaine, Melt four tablespoonfuls of butter; cook in it four tablespoonfuls, each, of cornstarch and flour and half a teaspoonful of salt, then add gradually one pint of milk. When thick and smooth stir in the beaten yolks of two eggs, add four tablespoonfuls of grated Parmesan cheese, and spread on a buttered pan to cool. Just before serving, cut the paste in shapes, lay on a baking-sheet, and brown delicately in the oven.
Two items run together here: the tail end of a cheese-straw paste (rough puff pastry with cheese folded in) and a full recipe for baked gnocchi alla romana. The straw text begins mid-sentence, so treat it as the folding-and-shaping half of a rough puff you have already begun.
- What the straw paste isThe missing opening was evidently a rough puff: flour and butter worked in lumps and moistened to a dough, then rolled, folded in three, given a half turn and rolled again. Cayenne is implied by the closing sentence. The cheese goes on at each turn rather than into the dough, which is what gives the straws their flaky layers.
- ProportionsOne and a half cups flour to half or a whole cup of grated cheese; the butter quantity belonged to the missing opening and is not recoverable. Assume a hard, dry, sharply flavoured cheese: a moist one weeps fat and the layers slump.
- "A moderate oven"Usually reckoned in this period as somewhere around 350-375F. Cheese straws brown more crisply at the upper end and take roughly 8-12 minutes; watch them, as the cheese darkens fast at the edges.
- Rings and bandsThe rings are collars: bake them flat, then thread three or four straws through each one for service. Bands half an inch wide are sturdier and are what get stacked "log-cabin style," alternating direction in layers on the plate.
- A doylieA doily, here a small linen or paper mat set on the serving plate to absorb any butter and to keep the straws from sliding. Any folded napkin does the same job.
- The shortcut is worth takingThe note at the end is the practical route: if the paste is only for straws, rub cheese and cayenne into the flour with the butter and skip the layered folding. You lose some flake and save most of the work.
- Gnocchi without semolinaThis version thickens milk with cornstarch and flour rather than the semolina used in Rome, so the set paste is softer, closer to a firm pastry cream. The recipe asks only that it be spread on a buttered pan to cool; spreading it thinly and letting it set firmly will help the shapes cut cleanly.
- Browning the gnocchi"Brown delicately in the oven" implies quick colouring rather than a long bake; a hot oven or a short spell under the broiler will do it. Extra butter and Parmesan on top are not called for here, though they are usual in the Roman dish.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield. A pint of milk thickened this far makes a modest panful of shapes, and the pastry quantity a substantial number of straws.
Both dishes belong to the turn-of-the-century fashion for small savoury accessories served alongside salads, at card parties, and at chafing-dish suppers, when a green salad was considered too slight to stand alone. Cheese straws descend from English savoury pastry, and it is tempting to read the log-cabin stack and the ring-and-straw arrangement as being about presentation on a doily-covered plate as much as flavour. The gnocchi is the Roman baked kind, semolina cooked to a paste, cooled, cut and gratinated, rather than the potato dumpling most readers now think of first.