Southern Cheese Straws
Buttery, peppery strips of sharp cheddar baked until crisp — a Southern party staple with a documented history stretching from an 1861 British household manual to the White House tables of both Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt.
- 8 ozsharp cheddar cheese(finely shredded)
- 0.5 cupbutter(softened)
- 1.5 cupsall-purpose flour
- 0.5 tspkosher salt
- 0.5 tspcayenne pepper
- 0.25 tsppaprika
- 2 tbspcold water(if needed)
Store in airtight container up to 1 week. Re-crisp in 300°F oven for 5 minutes if needed.
- 1Beat butter and cheese until combined
- 2Add flour, salt, cayenne, and paprika; mix until dough forms
- 3Add cold water if dough is too crumbly
- 4Chill dough 30 minutes
- 5Preheat oven to 350°F and line baking sheets with parchment
- 6Roll dough to 1/4-inch thickness
- 7Cut into strips about 5 inches long and 1/2-inch wide
- 8Twist each strip and place on baking sheet
- 9Bake 15-18 minutes until golden and crisp
- 10Cool completely on wire rack
Use the sharpest cheddar you can find - aged cheese has more flavor. Shred it yourself; pre-shredded has coatings that affect texture. The cayenne should be noticeable but not overwhelming. Don't overwork the dough or straws will be tough. Twisting creates attractive shape and extra crunch.
The cheese straw is one of the South's most fiercely claimed culinary traditions, but its paper trail begins in Britain. The earliest printed recipe that food historians can clearly trace is in Isabella Beeton's "The Book of Household Management," published in 1861 in London, where it appears as "Cayenne Cheeses" — a dough of butter, flour, Parmesan or Cheshire cheese, and cayenne pepper, rolled thin and cut into strips. Wikipedia confirms this as an early cheese straw antecedent. The first clearly labelled "Cayenne Cheese Straws" recipe in an American publication appears in the White House Cookbook of 1887, according to food historian John Martin Taylor's research published in Gastronomica. An earlier American appearance was recorded in Mrs. Annabella Hill's New Cookbook in 1867. Whether the recipe traveled from Britain to the American South or developed there independently is a matter of culinary debate; Taylor, who conducted the most thorough historical research on the subject, concluded in Gastronomica that they are "a fairly recent American culinary phenomenon, even if the first printed recipe I have found is in a British cookbook." What is undisputed is that the hot and humid Southern climate gave the cheese straw its particular meaning: Garden & Gun documents that making cheese straws "was once a way of preserving cheese in the hot and humid South," rendering perishable dairy into a shelf-stable cracker. Sharp cheddar and cayenne — not the Parmesan of the British version — became the Southern standard. The dish reached national recognition when President Woodrow Wilson served cheese straws at a White House dinner in 1913, and they appeared on President Franklin Roosevelt's Thanksgiving table in 1937, both documented by the Library of Congress.