Cheese Straws
Roll puff or plain paste one-fourth inch thick, sprinkle onehalf with grated cheese to which has been added few grains of salt and cayenne. Fold, press edges firmly together, fold again, pat, and roll out one-fourth inch thick. Sprinkle with cheese and proceed as before; repeat twice. Cut in strips five inches long and one-fourth inch wide. Bake eight minutes in hot oven.
Parmesan cheese, or equal parts of Parmesan and Edam cheese, may be used. Cheese straws are piled log cabin fashion and served with cheese or salad course.
Whites 2 eggs ¾ cup powdered sugar Condés 2 oz. almonds, blanched and finely chopped Beat whites of eggs until stiff, add sugar gradually, then almonds. Roll paste, and cut in strips three and one-half inches long by one and one-half inches wide. Spread with mixture; avoid having it come close to edge. Dust with powdered sugar and bake fifteen minutes in moderate oven.
Two puff-paste trifles run together on one page: savoury cheese straws and the almond-meringue Condés that Farmer treats as their sweet counterpart. Both depend on cold paste and a hot start.
- "Hot oven" and "moderate oven""Hot oven" and "moderate oven" are left unquantified here. Conventional modern equivalents are roughly 425-450F for a hot oven and 350-375F for a moderate one, which suit the eight- and fifteen-minute times given.
- Keep the paste coldThis is the hinge. Cheese warms and softens butter fast, and four rounds of sprinkling, folding and rolling will slacken the dough. Chill it in the refrigerator between turns and again after cutting, or the layers merge and the straws bake flat.
- Plain pasteIn this book "plain paste" is the ordinary pie crust — flour, salt, shortening or butter, ice water — not a laminated dough. It makes a shorter, crumblier straw; puff paste makes the classic flaky one.
- CheeseUse a hard, dry grating cheese. Parmesan is unchanged; the Edam then sold may well have been a firmer, saltier keeping cheese than the mild waxed blocks now common, in which case an aged Gouda is a reasonable stand-in. Grate finely so the folds close properly.
- Cutting and yieldCutting -- A quarter inch wide is narrow; a pastry wheel or pizza cutter gives cleaner edges than a knife. The recipe names no quantity of paste, so the yield depends entirely on how much you roll out.
- The CondésNothing in the original says so, but the paste for these is the same puff or plain paste. Spread the almond meringue thinly and stop a quarter inch from the edge, as instructed — it runs as it warms and will glue the pastry to the sheet.
- Powdered sugarIn this period the term meant sugar ground fine, generally coarser than modern cornstarch-blended confectioners' sugar and nearer to superfine or caster. Either will serve here; sift if lumped.
- Log cabin fashionStraws stacked in alternating crossed layers, like a child's toy cabin. It is a serving instruction, not a cooking one; the uniform five-inch length makes such stacking straightforward.
Cheese straws are often associated with the late-Victorian savoury course, the small salty item said to close an English dinner after the sweet and before the fruit; American cookbooks of the 1890s absorbed the form but moved it, as Fannie Farmer does here, alongside the salad or cheese course. Their placement is a matter of technique rather than category — the pastry chapter of the Boston Cooking-School Cook Book gathers everything built on puff and plain paste, so tarts, patty shells, straws and the almond-topped Condés all sit together. The Condé is generally traced to French pâtisserie, where a condé is a strip of puff pastry masked with almond royal icing and named, by tradition rather than record, for the princely house of Condé.