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Cheese Biscuits
Take six ounces of grated Parmesan cheese and mix it well with the same quantity of flour; then rub in four ounces of butter, add a little cayenne pepper and moisten with the yolk of an egg. Roll out one-fourth-inch thick, cut into long narrow strips and bake in a hot oven three to seven minutes.
A short-dough cheese straw, given by weight as English recipes of the period usually were. The only real difficulty is that the dough is drier than most modern cooks expect.
- Weights into cupsSix ounces of finely grated Parmesan is roughly 2 cups packed loosely; six ounces of flour is about 1 1/3 cups. Four ounces of butter is one standard American stick. Weighing is more reliable here than measuring, since grated cheese packs unpredictably.
- "A hot oven"Take this as 400-425F. At that heat thin strips colour fast, which is why the original gives so short a window.
- The three-to-seven minutesThat is a very short window, and the recipe's own quarter-inch thickness suggests it is optimistic. In a modern oven, quarter-inch strips usually need 8-12 minutes; pull them when the edges are pale gold and the surface looks dry. Parmesan scorches and turns bitter quickly, so watch rather than trust the clock.
- One yolk is not much moistureSix ounces of flour with no liquid but a single yolk gives a crumbly, almost sandy dough. Work it together with the heel of your hand, and if it will not cohere add ice water half a teaspoon at a time. Resist adding more than a tablespoon in total; a wet dough spreads and toughens.
- Chill before rollingWith four ounces of butter to six of flour, the dough softens quickly. Rest it in the refrigerator 20-30 minutes before rolling and again after cutting, and the strips will hold their shape.
- "Biscuits" means crackersThis is the British sense of the word: a crisp savoury, not a raised American breakfast biscuit. Expect something between a cheese straw and a shortbread cracker.
- The cheese mattersPeriod Parmesan was hard, dry and sharply salty, and the recipe adds no salt of its own. Use real aged Parmigiano-Reggiano or a similar hard grating cheese; pre-shredded cheese carries anti-caking starch and gives a chalky result.
- Yield and keepingYield depends entirely on the length and width of the strips, which the recipe does not specify. They keep a week in a tin and are best crisped for two or three minutes in a warm oven before serving.
Cheese straws of this kind belong to the savoury, the small sharp course that came after the sweet at late-Victorian and Edwardian dinners and was traditionally said to prepare the palate for the wine that followed. The formula here is the classic English one, essentially a rich shortcrust in which grated hard cheese replaces part of the flour, seasoned with cayenne rather than salt because the cheese supplies plenty of that. Parmesan appears in English and American cookery books of the period more often than one might expect: it travelled well, kept without refrigeration, and grated into a dry powder that could be handled like flour, which made it a common cheese for baked savouries. The Butterick Publishing Company, better known for dress patterns and its magazines, also issued household manuals of this sort to the same middle-class readership.