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Cheese Sticks
Cut bread sticks in halves lengthwise, spread thinly with butter, sprinkle with grated cheese seasoned with salt and cayenne, and bake until delicately browned.
A soup garnish rather than a dish in its own right, and the whole thing hangs on the cheese being dry enough to toast rather than melt into a puddle.
- What "bread sticks" meantPeriod bread-stick recipes are usually a yeast dough shaped in thin lengths and baked dry, nearer a slim crusty roll than a brittle Italian grissino, though the recipe itself does not say. A split baguette section, or a length of a thin crusty roll, is the nearest substitute; commercial soft breadsticks will go leathery instead of crisp.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given. Aim for 400F and watch them; "delicately browned" is 6 to 10 minutes depending on how thick the bread is.
- Choose a dry cheeseGrated Parmesan, aged Asiago or a dry aged Cheddar browns and crisps. A young supermarket Cheddar or anything pre-shredded with anti-caking starch will slump and weep fat onto the pan.
- Butter thinly, and mean itThe instruction "spread thinly" is the hinge. Too much butter soaks the crumb and the sticks steam soft in the middle rather than drying through.
- Cayenne quantityThe original leaves it open. A pinch for every half cup of grated cheese is enough to register as warmth against the soup without dominating it; mix the salt and cayenne into the cheese first so it distributes evenly.
- Serving and yieldFigure two to three halves per person alongside a cream soup or bisque. They are best within an hour of baking; if made ahead, re-crisp for two or three minutes rather than serving them limp.
Cheese sticks belong to a whole class of small crisp accompaniments — croutons, bread sticks, cheese straws, pulled bread, and the like — often served alongside soup. Cream soups thickened with flour and milk were widely made in American homes around 1900, cheap and quick and made without the long-simmered stockpot, and they wanted something crisp and salty to eat with them. Grated cheese in that era was often a hard dry cheese kept for the purpose, sometimes what cookbooks simply called "old cheese," as the softer young cheeses were said not to grate well. The cayenne-and-cheese combination shows up over and over in the period's cheese straws and Welsh rarebits, a fixture of Anglo-American cheese cookery well before it appeared in this book.