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Stilton Cheese
This is the king of English cheeses, and, therefore, as it commands a large price, subject to worthless imitations. Although Stilton takes its name from a town of that name in Huntingdon, it is chiefly manufactured near Melton Mowbray, in other parts of Leicestershire, and in Nottinghamshire. It is made in the shape of a cylinder, twice as long as broad, weighing about twelve pounds, and having a very rough, irregular whitish rind. When it is cut, the substance should be white, friable, yet mellow, and marked with greenish blue veins. According to the prevalence of these, the cheese will be judged; but as Stilton takes from three to six months to ripen, many experiments have been tried to give it the appearance of age, though the cheese itself may be young. Rich new milk, to which a proportion of cream is added, the quality varying in proportion to the skill used in its manufacture. The milk is set at ninety degrees Fahrenheit, the curd is broken down in about an hour, and removed into large strainer cloths, from which the whey gradually escapes. As the curd becomes firm, it is broken up and aired until it is sufficiently acid for salting and placing in vats. The vats, hoops or moulds, are filled by hand, and turned regularly until the cheese can be removed, and it is then covered with a clean binder every day until the crust commences to form, when it goes into the curing-room, and there it ripens better when the temperature is well maintained at from fifty-three to fifty-five degrees. "Strohl" Cheese.
Rub together six ounces of butter and six ounces of flour, and add six ounces of grated Parmesan cheese and a small quantity of cayenne, and after this is well mixed, add the yolks of three eggs and one tablespoonful of raw cream, working all together well. Roll the paste out thin, divide it into strips about five inches long, put these on a baking-sheet, and bake in a brisk oven. When they are done, put them on a dish with a folded napkin on it, and serve.
The entry opens as a reference note on Stilton — useful background, but not something you can follow at home — and ends with a genuine recipe for cheese straws, which is what these notes address.
- "Brisk oven"Read this as 425F. The strips are thin and rich; they colour in 8 to 10 minutes and go from golden to bitter quickly, so watch them from minute six.
- Weights, not cupsSix ounces each of butter, flour and Parmesan are weights: roughly 170 g butter, 1 1/3 cups flour, and about 2 cups finely grated Parmesan. Weighing matters here because the dough has no liquid beyond three yolks and a spoonful of cream.
- The hinge is chillingWith that much butter and cheese and almost no water, the paste turns greasy and unrollable at room temperature. Rest it in the refrigerator until firm, roll it cold on a floured surface to about 1/8 inch, and chill the cut strips again on the sheet before baking so they hold their shape.
- ParmesanUse a hard, dry, aged Parmigiano-Reggiano or grana and grate it fine. Pre-shredded cheese usually carries anti-caking agents, which can affect how the dough comes together.
- CayenneRead "a small quantity" as about 1/4 teaspoon for this quantity of flour, enough to register as warmth behind the cheese rather than heat. A pinch of salt is worth adding; the recipe leaves the seasoning to the Parmesan.
- YieldSeveral dozen straws five inches long, depending on how wide you cut them. They are best the day they are made and recrisp in a 300F oven for a few minutes.
- The napkinServing on a folded napkin was standard presentation for hot baked and fried savouries; it also blots any fat and helps keep the straws from sliding. A cloth-lined basket does the same job.
- The Stilton passageThe cheesemaking description is an account of commercial practice, not a set of instructions: it gives a setting temperature and a curing range but no rennet quantity, culture, salt percentage or timings you could work from. Read it as period reportage rather than as a recipe to attempt.
Cheese straws belong to the savoury course, the small salted dish that closed a formal English or Anglo-American dinner after the sweet, and they were commonly served with cheese of this kind. If the entry is Oscar Tschirky's - the Swiss-born maitre d'hotel whose name carried the Waldorf's dining rooms, and whose cookbook appeared in 1896 - then the pairing of an encyclopaedia-style note on a prestige ingredient with a short recipe to accompany it fits the way the volume is put together. The name "Strohl" is unexplained in the text; it may be a rendering of the German Stroh, straw, or equally a garbled proper name. Period cookbooks call the same thing cheese straws, paillettes au parmesan in French kitchens. The insistence on Stilton's rough whitish rind and greenish-blue veining chimes with a real anxiety of the period: Stilton commanded a premium, it had no legal protection then, and imitations made to suggest age were a recognised trade problem long before the name was formally safeguarded.