Cheese Straws
Roll plain or puff paste into a rectangular sheet one-fourth an inch thick. Sprinkle one-half with grated cheese (any kind of cheese will do, but Parmesan is preferred); also add a few grains of cayenne and salt. Fold the other half over this
A standard turn-of-the-century cheese straw: cheese folded into pastry, rolled, cut into ribbons and baked crisp. The original stops before the baking, so the working details below fill in what a cook of the period would have taken for granted.
- The hinge is cold pastryGrated cheese warms and softens dough quickly. Work fast, and chill the folded sheet for 15-20 minutes before the final roll and cut, or the straws slump and leak fat instead of puffing.
- Plain paste vs. puff paste"Plain paste" is ordinary short pie pastry; "puff paste" is the laminated kind. Plain paste gives a sandy, cracker-like straw, puff gives a light flaky one. Either works with the same fold-and-roll treatment.
- Cheese choiceThe recipe allows any cheese but prefers Parmesan; it gives no reason. Parmesan is dry and salty and will not weep, whereas a young, high-moisture cheese releases water and grease; if you use cheddar, choose a well-aged one and grate it fine.
- Thickness and cuttingThe original gives one-fourth inch for the sheet before folding and says nothing about cutting. Rolling back out to about that thickness and cutting strips roughly a quarter-inch wide and five to six inches long is a reasonable modern working guess. Twist them if you like; the twist holds shape better on the sheet.
- OvenThe text breaks off before any baking instruction. A modern equivalent is a hot oven, around 425F, for 8-10 minutes, until the straws are set and lightly coloured at the edges. They darken fast at the ends, so watch them from minute six.
- SaltParmesan is already salty and the original adds salt as well. Taste the cheese first and hold back if the pastry is already seasoned.
- Yield and servingYield depends entirely on how the sheet is cut. They are best the day they are baked; recrisp in a 300F oven if they soften.
Cheese straws belong to the late-Victorian and Edwardian savoury course, the small salty item served with or after salad, soup, or at the end of a formal dinner in the English fashion. Their appearance in a book on salads, sandwiches and chafing-dish cookery reflects the period's appetite for light, portable accompaniments suited to lunches, card parties and informal suppers, the same territory as the chafing dish itself. The preference for Parmesan was arguably practical rather than fashionable: imported grating cheese is likely to have kept well in an era of uneven refrigeration and, being dry, would have behaved predictably in pastry. Folding grated cheese into a sheet of paste and rolling it back out is a miniature version of the lamination used for puff paste, a technique often said to have circulated in English cookery writing of the period.