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Cheese Straws
(1). Put one-half saltspoonful each of cayenne and salt into two ounces of flour; then mix in two ounces of butter, and add two ounces of grated Parmesan cheese; mix all these to a thick paste with the yolk of an egg. Roll this out to about five inches in length, cut it into rings and strips, lay them on a greased baking-sheet and bake for ten minutes in a fast oven. When they are done pass the straws through the rings like a bundle of sticks, and serve. (2). Roll thin scraps of puff paste, sprinkle over with grated cheese, fold, roll out, and sprinkle again; then repeat the process and place on the ice to harden. When cold roll out to an oblong flat an eighth of an inch thick, place it on a baking sheet, and with a pastry cutter, cut into strips four or five inches long and less than a quarter of an inch wide. Bake and serve piled in cross triangles or squares. When the paste is very hard it is necessary to cut them as narrow as possible, laying them in the pans in groups of five or six, with one stalk tied round the middle to represent a bundle of straws, and baked in that position.
Two methods for the same thing: a short cheese pastry cut into straws and rings, and a quicker version using puff-paste trimmings. Both were meant as a savoury nibble, not a cracker to keep for weeks.
- SaltspoonfulA saltspoon is about a quarter teaspoon, so half of one is roughly 1/8 teaspoon each of cayenne and salt. That is a genuinely warm amount of cayenne against 2 oz of flour, which is the point of the dish.
- Ounces are weight, not volumeTwo ounces of flour is a scant 1/2 cup, 2 oz butter is 4 tablespoons, and 2 oz Parmesan is about 2/3 cup finely grated. Weighing is easier than converting here, and the equal weights of flour, butter and cheese are what make the paste short.
- Fast ovenRead that as 425-450F. Thin cheese pastry colours fast at that heat, so check at 7 or 8 minutes rather than trusting the full ten.
- Keep it cold, and rest itThis is the hinge. With as much butter as flour and no water, the paste turns greasy the moment it warms; chill the dough before rolling and chill the cut straws on the sheet before they go in. Warm paste spreads and the straws fry rather than bake.
- Rings and strawsCut the rings with two round cutters, a large one and a small one, from the same sheet. The recipe bakes rings and strips together on one sheet; thread the straws through once both are cool enough to handle without snapping.
- "Place on the ice"An icebox instruction: refrigerate. For the puff-paste version, 20-30 minutes in the fridge between the folds is enough, and the dough should be firm but not rock-hard when you roll it out to an eighth of an inch.
- The tied bundleThe "one stalk tied round the middle" is done before baking, with a strip of the same paste wrapped around a group of five or six. It only holds if the paste is soft enough to bend, so do that immediately after cutting.
- YieldVersion 1 is a small batch; the quantity of straws will depend entirely on how narrow you cut them. Serve the day they are baked; they go soft overnight.
Cheese straws belong to the savoury course, the small salty dish that came after the sweet at formal Victorian and Edwardian dinners, and they were also handed round with soup or with wine. The reliance on Parmesan is telling: it grated dry, kept well in a nineteenth-century larder, and carried enough flavour that two ounces would season a whole batch, though period recipes of this type just as often call for Cheshire or Cheddar, or simply for grated cheese. Oscar Tschirky was the Waldorf's maitre d'hotel rather than its chef, and his 1896 book reads like a working compilation of the hotel's repertoire, which may explain the two competing methods printed side by side, the second being frankly a way of using up puff-paste trimmings from other work. The decorative finish, straws threaded through rings or tied into faggots to mimic a bundle of sticks, reflects a kitchen culture in which presentation at the table was expected to make a visual joke out of the name of the dish.