Home › Cheese Dishes › Cheese Straws (Roll pastry a quarter)
Cheese Straws (Roll pastry a quarter)
Roll pastry a quarter of an inch thick. Sprinkle onehalf with grated Parmesan cheese, adding a dash of salt and paprika. Fold the other half over this and press the edges together; fold again, then pat and roll out to a quarter of an inch; then add cheese as before. Repeat the process twice more. Cut in strips or straws and bake about eight minutes.
A laminated cheese pastry with no oven temperature and no quantities — both were assumed knowledge in 1900. The lamination is the point: each fold-and-roll traps another layer of cheese, and the straws puff into flakes rather than baking flat.
- Oven temperatureThe book gives none. Cheese straws of this thickness want a hot oven, 425F, so the layers set and puff before the cheese scorches. Eight minutes is right at that heat; check at six.
- What pastryAny short or rough-puff trimming would suit. The book does not say what pastry to use, or how much.
- Cheese quantityUnstated. Figure 2 to 3 tablespoons of finely grated Parmesan per folding. Grate it fine; coarse shreds tear the layers when you roll.
- Keep it coldRepeated rolling warms the fat and the cheese oils soften with it. Rest the dough in the refrigerator for 15 minutes partway through, or the layers merge and the straws bake solid.
- CuttingStrips about 1/4 inch wide and 5 to 6 inches long are usual. Cut with a sharp knife in one downward stroke rather than dragging, which seals the cut edge and stops the rise.
- PaprikaIn 1900 this would most likely have been sweet paprika, used for colour and a mild bite. Smoked paprika is a Spanish product that was not generally available to American cooks then, and will read as anachronistic here, though it is not wrong.
- ServingServed warm alongside soup or salad, or passed with cheese at the end of dinner. They keep two days in a tin and are best refreshed for two minutes in a 350F oven.
Cheese straws belong to the late-Victorian and Edwardian savoury course, the small salted dish that came after the sweet and before the fruit at a formal English dinner — a custom American cookbooks of the period borrowed with enthusiasm. The folding method described here is a domestic shortcut to puff pastry, the same principle worked with fewer turns and a filling of cheese instead of butter, and it appears in variations across British and American books of the 1890s and 1900s.