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Cheese Fingers
Roll some puff paste very thin and cut it into strips four inches long and not quite one-half an inch wide. Have ready one cup of grated stale cheese and mix with it one-half teaspoon of salt and one-fourth teaspoon of cayenne, strew this mixture on the paste, double each strip lengthwise, pinch the edge together and bake in a quick oven twelve minutes. Now, brush each over with beaten egg, sprinkle with cheese and put in the oven again for two minutes or just long enough to melt the cheese. Serve with the salad.
A cheese straw by another name, and one of the easier Butterick recipes to bring forward: the only real conversions are the oven and the pastry.
- "A quick oven"425–450°F. Puff paste needs that heat to lift; a cooler oven leaks butter and gives you flat, greasy strips. Twelve minutes at 425°F is about right for pastry this thin, then the two-minute return to melt the topping.
- Puff pasteA sheet of frozen all-butter puff pastry, thawed and rolled thinner than it comes, does the job. One standard sheet yields a large number of strips at four inches by half an inch; scale the cheese mixture to what you actually cut.
- "Stale cheese"This means dry, firm cheese that grates to a powder rather than a clump — an aged Cheddar, or Parmesan. Fresh moist cheese releases water and the strips soften instead of crisping.
- The heatA quarter teaspoon of cayenne in one cup of cheese is assertive by design; these were meant to bite against a plain salad. Halve it if serving to a mixed table.
- Sealing the stripsPress the folded edge firmly, and press the ends too. Cheese that escapes will burn onto the pan before the pastry is done, so line it with parchment.
- Roll thin, and cold"Very thin" is about 1/8 inch. Chill the cut strips for fifteen minutes before baking so they hold their shape and the layers separate cleanly.
- ServingBest within an hour or two of baking, while the pastry is still shattering. They will keep a day in a tin and can be revived for three or four minutes in a moderate oven, 350°F.
Cheese fingers, cheese straws and cheese biscuits all belong to the late-Victorian and Edwardian savoury course — the small, sharp, salty thing that came after the sweet at a formal dinner, or, as here, alongside a salad. Butterick was a pattern company, and its cook book was aimed at the household that wanted to entertain correctly without a French chef; recipes like this one exist because a hostess needed something to put beside a plate of dressed lettuce that looked deliberate. The instruction to use "stale" cheese reflects a kitchen where the cheese was a whole piece that dried at the edges rather than a plastic-wrapped block, and the cayenne reflects a period taste for cayenne in almost everything cheesy, from Welsh rarebit to potted cheese.