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Cheese Sticks
Cut stale bread in long, narrow strips, spread with butter and then with a thick coating of grated cheese. Place in the oven until brown. Crackers may be treated in a similar manner. These should be passed when the soup is served.
A three-line recipe that assumes you know what to do; the only real variables are the oven temperature and how long you leave them.
- Oven temperatureThe book gives none. A hot oven of about 400F browns the cheese before the bread dries to a hard rusk. At 350F the strips crisp through more evenly but the cheese stays paler.
- TimingExpect 6 to 10 minutes at 400F, watching from minute five. Grated cheese goes from browned to scorched and bitter very quickly, and the butter underneath accelerates it.
- Stale breadThe recipe calls for it and it works in its favour. Day-old bread with a firm, close crumb cuts into clean strips and dries rather than steams; fresh sandwich bread tears and turns leathery.
- CuttingStrips roughly a finger wide and the length of the slice, so they can be picked up from a passed plate in one hand. Crusts on or off is a matter of looks.
- The cheese'Grated cheese' here most plausibly means a dry, hard cheese, such as an aged Cheddar or a dry American cheese. Anything high in moisture, such as young Cheddar or pre-shredded cheese with anti-caking starch, will slide off or bead with oil rather than form a crust.
- Butter firstThe butter is glue as much as flavour. Spread it right to the edges or the cheese at the ends will fall away as the sticks dry.
- Yield and servingA large slice of bread gives four or five sticks; figure two or three per person. They are meant to be passed hot with the soup course, and they lose their point once soft, so bake them while the soup is heating.
Cheese sticks belong to a small family of soup accompaniments that Anglo-American cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries listed alongside croutons, bread sticks and cheese straws, the last being the same idea built from puff or short pastry rather than bread. Their function was partly economic and partly ceremonial: stale bread was often put to use rather than discarded, and dressing it with butter and cheese turned a scrap into something that could be passed when the soup was served. The Butterick Publishing Company, better known for dress patterns and The Delineator, issued its cook book as part of a broader line of domestic manuals aimed at middle-class women running a house with little or no help. Serving soup with something passed alongside it was one of the small formalities that marked a properly set table, and it could be managed with bread, butter and a grater.