Long before seeing Julie & Julia, I decided that it’d be really nice to know how to cook. Maybe it was the laugh of derision I got from my roommate when I asked her how to cook spaghetti
“Well you start with boiling water”
“And how do I do that exactly?”
“…”
“And then you add salt”
“How much?”
“It doesn’t matter”
“I NEED TO KNOW!!!!!”
“…”
or the feelings of helplessness, and abject terror during the Holidays when, watching my mother do things to a turkey which should not be allowed in the United States, I realized that one day I may be expected to do the same thing.
And not being one to start small, or simple, I asked my grandmother if she could teach me to make grillades. For those of you who aren’t from New Orleans, grillades is a roux based dish loosely related to beef stew. I think I started with grillades because growing up, I always knew it was the most difficult recipe my mother could make. She also knew it was my favorite, so whenever she decided to make it, I appreciated it.
Most people, when they start dinner, likely start around an hour or two before dinner is supposed to be served. In our house, we usually ate around 7.
My mother would start making grillades at noon. At the latest.
This is partly because you’re supposed to actually cook the meat until it’s tender enough to cut with a fork. This takes a minimum of 2 hours, but anything in excess of that is better. And with all the chopping and measuring and browning and beating that goes on before this de minimis 2 hour window, you learn that it’s better to start when you wake up.
When my grandmother taught me, she also taught me a few tricks. Namely, grocery stores in New Orleans sell ‘creole seasonings’ in plastic tubs so you don’t have to spend an hour attacking vegetables with a knife. She also liked to keep a coffee tin of bacon grease by her stove and nothing browns meat faster than pure fat. By the end of the day, I still didn’t know how to cook, but I could still follow a recipe.
Then came cheese straws.
Grillades are time consuming, but they’re also filling and usually result in a ton of leftovers. Not so of cheese straws. Ever since I was a little girl, my various relatives would make these crack-filled cheese crackers for Thanksgiving and Christmas. They never lasted. My mother to this day has to hide a bag of them in order to get them to survive the night.
My uncle Robert always made his the spiciest, which meant his lasted the longest but also had to be eaten delicately and with a beverage.
Everyone had a different press, and a different oven, but we all used the same recipe: The Plantation Cookbook of 1972. This was the same book we used for grillades, crawfish etouffee, baked cheese grits, and french silk pie. If you go your entire life with one cookbook, that’s the one to buy.
I knew dimly that you could buy cheese straws in a store. They taste like paste and aren’t very spicy, let alone crispy, but I figured that there were only two camps: homemade and store bought. The store bought ones may all taste like crap, but surely all homemade cheese straws were created equal. Surely every other southerner on the planet was making the 1972 Junior League of New Orleans cheese straw.
And surely none of us were following their ludicrous spice amounts.
I should add that in the six years I’ve been making cheese straws, I have yet to run into another person who knew what the hell one was. Granted I’ve been making them in Carbondale, IL and St. Louis, MO for a bunch of MFAers in Creative Writing and law students, respectively but I thought that at some point I would run into another southerner who had heard of the damn things. When I didn’t, I began to think cheese straws were like my family’s pronunciation of mayonnaise… theoretically ubiquitous but actually not so much (for the curious, my family pronounces it “my nez” because it’s a French word and you don’t go around saying “kay ann” pepper either).
Then I ran into another southern cookbook with a recipe for cheese straws, and the recipe got it wrong. They had incorrect proportions of flour and cheese and margarine, not to mention equally ludicrous spice amounts. I went online, same thing. Every recipe I could find was just plain wrong.
Now maybe this is unfair… perhaps other cooks know something I do not about the ratio of flour and perhaps they don’t mind the greasiness that results from using butter instead of margarine (and to this I say INSANITY), but I can ignore this travesty of spice no longer.
So here follows the recipe from the Plantation Cookbook, 1972 and then I’ll tell you what’s wrong with it and every other recipe out there.
2 cups of all purpose flour, sifted
1 and a half sticks of margarine
1/2 tsp salt
1 1/4 tsp baking powder (NOT baking soda, just so we’re clear)
15 oz extra sharp cheddar cheese, grated
1 tsp cayenne (optional)
5 to 6 dashes of tobasco
Sift flour once, add salt and baking powder, sift again. Set aside. Mix Cheese and margarine (it’s better if you let the margarine reach room temp first). Add cayenne and tobasco. Mix. Slowly add flour. When all is mixed, roll dough in thin strips on baking sheet. Bake 10 minutes in 300 degree preheated oven, then x minutes at 225.
I’m doing this from memory so I can’t remember what the x was. I have a gas oven so I do 12 minutes at 300, then 30 minutes at 260 (my oven doesn’t go down to 225). I also use a cookie press, not those ridiculous strips.
Now about those spices. If you want a cheese cracker, buy a damn box of cheez-its. It’s a helluva lot less work. The point of a cheese straw is it’s a homemade labor-of-love crispy delivery device for pepper. A cheese straw with the recommended amount of spice wouldn’t taste like anything. Since beginning my odyssey I have never used less than double the recommended amount. But here’s the second, far more important reason:
People acclimate to spices. When I brought my first batch to a party in Carbondale, everyone who tried them thought they were too spicy. Didn’t stop them from eating all of them, though. A few years later, my friend Renee warned a girl who’d never had a straw before that these “weren’t even that spicy compared to how [I] normally made them”, I had to correct her to say the opposite. She’d just gotten used to them.
Cheese straws take hours to make just one batch, and I’m not like my mother. I can’t hide them in a cabinet and forget they’re there. Just once I’d like to be able to have a tin that lasts a few days… maybe even a week.
Cheese straws are love. They’re goodness and joy wrapped up in a burning sensation that increases with certain kinds of wine. I’ve seen men excuse themselves to the restroom because they needed to down a water fountain, come back, and continue to scarf them down.
I think cheese straws are the reason I have friends.
