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Cheese Straws (Chop one large tablespoonful)
Chop one large tablespoonful of butter into one cup of flour; mix in one saltspoon paprika and cup of grated cheese; wet with ice water to a stiff paste. Roll out very thin; cut with pastry jagger into strips one-fourth inch wide by six inches long. Lay them apart on a wet baking pan; bake in quick oven a delicate brown. Sprinkle with fine salt.
A very lean cheese pastry — one tablespoon of butter to a cup of flour — that depends on the fat in the cheese to hold it together. Everything hinges on rolling thin and watching the oven, since straws this slender go from pale to burnt in under a minute.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is about a quarter teaspoon. Note that the dough itself carries no salt beyond what the cheese brings; the finishing sprinkle is doing the seasoning.
- Quick oven425-450F. At that heat quarter-inch straws need roughly 6 to 9 minutes. Check at five and turn the pan.
- The cheese"Grated cheese" in recipes of this kind usually implies a dry, sharp, well-aged cheese, such as a firm cheddar or Parmesan. A young or high-moisture cheese will leak fat and give you limp straws rather than crisp ones.
- The butter is not a typoOne tablespoon to a cup of flour is unusually lean, and the cheese supplies much of the remaining fat, which is why the dough feels dry and sandy before the ice water goes in. Add water a teaspoon at a time; a stiff paste, not a soft one.
- Pastry jaggerA fluted pastry wheel, which gives the straws their crimped edge. A pizza wheel or a knife works, and a ruler laid along the dough keeps the strips even.
- Wet baking panThe reason for wetting the pan is not given; it may have been to guard against scorching or sticking on thin tin. A parchment-lined sheet serves the same purpose, and the straws will lift off whole instead of snapping.
- RollingAim for about an eighth of an inch. Chill the rolled sheet for ten minutes before cutting and the strips will keep their shape as they transfer to the pan.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; a cup of flour cut into strips this small will produce well over three dozen. They are best the day they are made; recrisp any leftovers for two or three minutes in a moderate oven.
Cheese straws belong to the late-Victorian savoury course — the small salted mouthful served after the sweet, or with wine, in the English manner that American cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s took up. The technique is simply short pastry with the shortening partly replaced by hard cheese, and straws of this length were often stacked log-fashion or arranged through a pastry ring on the plate. Paprika appears here rather than the cayenne more usual in earlier recipes; Hungarian paprika was becoming more widely available in American groceries around this period. The instruction to wet the baking pan may have been a response to thin tin sheets over unpredictable ranges.