These are made with parings of a puff paste giving it six turns (No. 146); and dredging over the paste at each turn some grated parmesan cheese and red pepper, after it is rolled out. Then roll them very thin, let them rest and cut from the pieces bands an eighth of an inch wide, and seven inches long; place them on a floured baking sheet close together but not touching each other; bake them in a slack oven so that they become dry and crisp.
Ranhofer's cheese straws are a use for puff-paste trimmings, and the method is essentially unchanged today. A few of his terms and temperatures need translating.
Paillette is French for a spangle, and the name describes the finished thing exactly: thin gilded splinters of pastry. Charles Ranhofer, who ran the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York for over thirty years, filed them among cold side dishes rather than with the pastry, though the book gives no explanation for the placement. The recipe's real logic is economy in a large professional kitchen: puff paste was made in quantity, trimmings accumulated all day, and reworked scraps could not be used for anything that needed a clean rise. Cheese and cayenne turned a liability into something the dining room paid for. Cheese straws in this general form appear across English and French professional cookery of the period, and the pairing of parmesan with cayenne in a short or puff paste is old enough by 1894 that Ranhofer gives it without comment.