There's a card in my grandmother's handwriting for cheese biscuits, and it is almost aggressively complete.
Oven temperature, one bake time. The yield is defined. Rolling thickness specified down to the eighth of an inch. A note about which kind of baking sheet. She left nothing to chance with this recipe.
Then you read the ingredients and find the actual problem. The instructions are perfect. One of the products they depend on hasn't been sold in that size for decades.
The Card as Written
Cheese Biscuits. Makes 3 to 4 doz.
Combine: 1 jar (5 oz) sharp cheese (Kraft), 1 pkg (10 oz) pie crust mix, dash cayenne pepper or tabasco sauce. Mix well.
Place between 2 sheets of wax paper, roll out to thickness of 1/8 inch. Cut into round with biscuit cutter, cheese straws. Place on ungreased baking sheets. Bake at 375 for 12 to 15 minutes.
What I Had To Look Up
First, the name
The card is titled Cheese Biscuits. The instructions tell you to cut rounds with a biscuit cutter and then, mid sentence, call them cheese straws. They're neither. A cheese straw is a long thin strip, usually pressed through a cookie press. What this recipe makes is a round wafer about the size of a silver dollar. Three names, and it belongs to none of them. I'm keeping her title because the card is the card. But, if you're searching for what these actually are, the word is wafers.
The cheese, miraculously, still exists
Kraft Old English Sharp Pasteurized Process Cheese Spread. Same 5 ounce glass jar, still on shelves, somewhere around four and a half dollars.
I did not expect that. This card is old enough that half its assumptions should be dead, and yet a jar of processed cheese spread has outlasted nearly everything else written on it. You can drive to Kroger this afternoon and buy her exact ingredient.
The pie crust mix does not
Betty Crocker's pie crust mix now comes in an 11 ounce box that makes two 9 inch crusts. Jiffy's box is smaller. The 9 ounce boxes with two sticks inside, which is what a lot of cards from this era assume you have, are long gone.
The pie crust mix does not
Betty Crocker's pie crust mix now comes in an 11 ounce box that makes two 9 inch crusts. Jiffy's box is smaller. The 9 ounce boxes with two sticks inside, which is what a lot of cards from this era assume you have, are long gone.
Three ways around it:
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Use the 11 ounce box. One extra ounce against 5 ounces of cheese gives you a slightly drier, slightly less cheesy wafer. Modern versions of this recipe pair that exact 11 ounce box with the same 5 ounce jar, so it demonstrably works.
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Weigh out 10 ounces and set the rest aside, if you want her ratio precisely.
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Skip the mix entirely. Cut 2/3 cup shortening into 2 cups flour with 1 teaspoon salt. That's the standard two crust pastry ratio and it stands in for the box. Do not add water. The cheese spread is the only liquid this dough gets.
Leave the oven alone
375 for 12 to 15 minutes is hers, it's specific, and it sits right where modern cheese wafer recipes land. There's nothing to correct.
The instruction to take seriously is the thickness. An eighth of an inch is thin, and thin is the difference between crisp and leathery. It's the only measurement she bothered to be exact about, which tells me she learned that one the hard way.
The wax paper isn't a suggestion
This dough is soft and sticky and will fight a rolling pin. Rolling it between two sheets is the technique, not a tidiness tip, which is why it made the card at all.
Parchment does the same job if you don't keep wax paper around.
Why it's a holiday recipe
Cheese wafers keep, they freeze, and they pack into a tin without breaking, which is how they ended up on every Southern Christmas party table and in the hands of every hostess in December.
Three to four dozen from one jar and one box is also an absurd return for the effort involved.
The Whole Thing, In One Place
375°F. Ungreased baking sheets. 12 to 15 minutes. Makes 3 to 4 dozen.
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1 jar (5 oz) Kraft Old English sharp cheese spread
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1 package (10 to 11 oz) pie crust mix
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Dash of cayenne, or a few dashes of Tabasco
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Combine all three and mix well.
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Place the dough between two sheets of wax paper and roll to 1/8 inch thick.
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Cut rounds with a biscuit cutter.
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Place on ungreased baking sheets.
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Bake at 375 for 12 to 15 minutes.
Every step there is hers. All I did was find out what the box weighs now.
What This Card Tells Me About My Grandmother
I keep expecting these recipes to be more virtuous than they are.
There's a version of this website where every card starts from scratch and nothing comes out of a package. Instead I've got a jar of processed cheese spread, a boxed mix, a dash of Tabasco, and three to four dozen of something people apparently could not stop eating.
She wasn't a purist. She was efficient. She found the fastest possible route to a tin of cheese wafers, wrote it on an index card, and it worked well enough that the card outlived her.
I take a certain amount of comfort in that. I come from people who used shortcuts, and I'd like that on the record.