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Cheese Fingers
Sift together one cupful of flour and one-quarter teaspoonful of baking powder; add one cupful of grated cheese, half a teaspoonful of salt and half a saltspoonful of cayenne pepper; mix with a little cold water to a stiff dough, handling as lightly as possible. Roll out thin, cut in strips and bake on greased letter paper on the bottom of a dripping pan reversed.
This is a cheese straw dough with no added fat: the shortening comes entirely from the cheese, so the choice of cheese and the lightness of your hand decide whether the strips come out crisp or leathery.
- Use a dry, aged cheeseA firm aged cheddar, or a hard grating cheese, gives the fat and flavour the dough needs. Fresh young cheeses with high moisture will give a slack dough; pre-shredded cheese carries an anti-caking starch coating that works against a smooth one.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is generally reckoned as a quarter teaspoon, so half a saltspoonful of cayenne is about an eighth of a teaspoon. Spread across the whole batch that is a light background heat; reduce it further if you are serving these to a mixed table.
- Water, added sparingly"A little cold water" is likely to be two to four tablespoons, and the amount varies with how much moisture your cheese carries. Add it a spoonful at a time and stop the moment the dough coheres.
- Handle as lightly as possibleThis is the hinge. Overworking develops gluten and warms the cheese fat, and the strips bake tough instead of short. Bring the dough together with a few strokes and roll it once.
- Letter paper and the reversed dripping panGreased letter paper does the job modern parchment does; the inverted roasting pan is simply a flat, rimless surface that lets heat reach the strips evenly. A parchment-lined baking sheet, or an upturned sheet pan, does both jobs.
- No oven temperature is givenCheese pastry of this kind bakes at about 400F for 8 to 12 minutes, until the strips are set and just colouring at the edges. They scorch quickly once the cheese begins to brown, so watch them from minute eight.
- Thickness and cutRoll to about an eighth of an inch and cut strips roughly half an inch wide by four or five inches long. Thicker strips stay soft in the middle; thinner ones darken before they crisp.
- Yield and keepingOne cup of flour makes roughly three dozen straws. Cool them fully on a rack, since they firm up as they cool, and store airtight; they soften within a day or two in humid weather and can be revived briefly in a warm oven.
Cheese straws belong to the late-Victorian and Edwardian savoury course, the small salty dish served after the sweet at a formal dinner or handed round with wine, and cookbooks of the period often file them alongside cheese ramekins, cheese soufflés and Welsh rarebit under a general "cheese dishes" heading. The instruction to bake on greased letter paper laid over an inverted dripping pan is a reminder that the flat, rimmed baking sheet was not yet standard equipment in every kitchen: the dripping pan was the deep tin that sat under a roast, and turning it over produced the flat surface a cook needed for thin, quick-baking work. Cayenne seems to have been a conventional seasoning for cheese dishes in this period, appearing in rarebits, cheese biscuits and potted cheeses alike, and its presence here is arguably as much a convention of the genre as a matter of taste.