Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Cheese Biscuits
Cheese Biscuits
Grate into a mortar five or six ounces of any desired cheese, mix with it a teacupful of the best wheat flour, and one-half pound of cream curds; season with a small quantity of salt, and pound well, adding gradually five ounces of warm butter; then mix in a sufficient quantity of beaten eggs to form a stiff paste. Sprinkle a little flour over a table, put the paste on it and roll it out until very thin. Cut the paste into rounds with a tin cutter about one and one-half inches in diameter, arrange them on butter baking-sheets allowing a small space between each, and bake in a quick oven. When cooked put the biscuits on an ornamental dish-paper, or a folded table napkin, and serve while they are hot.
A rich cheese-and-curd paste rolled thin and baked as small savoury wafers. The wording is Victorian but the method is straightforward once the vessels and the two vague measures are pinned down.
- Cream curdsThis means fresh, unripened curd cheese drained of whey — what a modern shop sells as farmer's cheese, dry curd cottage cheese or quark. Half a pound is about a cup, and it should be dry rather than wet; excess whey will slacken the paste and make it impossible to roll thin.
- TeacupfulA Victorian teacup is smaller than a modern mug; a teacupful is usually reckoned at somewhere between 5 and 6 fluid ounces, so roughly two-thirds to three-quarters of a cup of flour. Treat it as a starting point: the paste is finished by feel, adding flour or egg until it is stiff enough to roll.
- A quick ovenRoughly 400-450F. These are thin, high-fat wafers and want fast heat so they set and colour before the butter renders out; only a few minutes will be needed, and they colour very quickly once they start, so watch them.
- The mortarThe pounding is there to work cheese, curd and butter into one smooth paste with no lumps of grated cheese left. A food processor does it in under a minute — pulse the cheese, flour and curds together, then add the softened butter in stages as written.
- Warm butterWarm means soft and pliable, not melted. Melted butter will make an oily paste that spreads on the sheet instead of holding a clean round.
- Choice of cheeseThe recipe says to grate the cheese, which points to a firm, well-flavoured grating cheese such as Parmesan, dry Cheddar or Gruyere. A soft or high-moisture cheese will not give the necessary savour against half a pound of bland curd.
- Beaten eggsAdd them a spoonful at a time. One large egg is often sufficient; the instruction is to reach a stiff paste, and one egg too many turns it into a batter.
- Chilling before rollingNot in the original, but with five ounces of butter the paste rolls far better after half an hour in the refrigerator. Roll it thin, about an eighth of an inch, or the biscuits will be cakey rather than crisp.
- Yield and serviceRounds of an inch and a half rolled very thin will give several dozen from this quantity of paste. The recipe directs that they be served hot, on an ornamental dish-paper or a folded napkin, and they are best soon after baking.
Oscar Tschirky was never technically the chef of the Waldorf — he was the maître d'hôtel — but his name carried the hotel's authority, and the 1896 cookbook published under it collects the repertoire of a large New York kitchen working in the French and Anglo-American manner. Small hot cheese biscuits like these are often associated with the English savoury course, the salty bite served after the sweet and before the fruit, a convention that American hotel dining adopted along with much else from London clubs and grand hotels. The use of fresh curd alongside grated cheese is older still, and it gives these wafers a tenderness that a straight cheese pastry does not have.