Cheese on a stick
"What we have here is an age-old comfort food that stemmed from the (obviously true) idea that bread and cheese work well together".
Will Fulton - ThrillList
Last night on the news there was one of those silly little items about a lady who had a company that made cheese on a stick (and hotdogs on a stick and lemonade). She was Australian and was at the Sydney Royal Show and has apparently been doing it for forty years. But she now has several people doing it for her and lots of stands at shows mostly in America. Indeed she now lives in America. This is the Home page of her website - which really doesn't tell you much at all. I was going to do a profile piece but without the information I have nowhere to go with that.
But, of course, when I started looking into it I found a lot of other stuff, that can be sort of separated out into origins and variations as well as a diatribe against deep-fried foods. No I won't do the last one - that's a bit obvious isn't it?
So - origins. Apparently they really date back to the Middle Ages and a French cooking book called Le Ménager de Paris, but I bet they were doing it well before then. This was just the first time it was written down:
"Take egg yolks and flour and salt, and a little wine, and beat together strongly, and cheese chopped in thin slices, and then roll the slices of cheese in the batter, and then fry in an iron skillet with oil in it. This can also be made using beef marrow."
Nowadays I think they are not so much deep-fried in batter, but breaded. But I may, of course, be wrong. The Australian lady's version looks like this, and I have to say that looks like fried bread not batter to me:
"It's kind of like a souped up grilled cheese sandwich"
But going back to the origins I guess there are things like saganaki - fried haloumi cheese. However, it is more than likely that it's an American thing. This is where they are most popular - so popular that MacDonalds ventured into them until it was found that some of them had no cheese in the middle. Theories vary as to how they came about - in bars - they go well with cold beer perhaps. When modern deep frying technology developed ...
A lot of my information came from an article on the ThrillList by Will Fulton, including the quotes below.
"I have to believe someone with a deep fryer was looking for something new besides French fries, chicken, and onion rings that could be made in little kitchens in bowling alleys". Dr. Joel Jensen
"it's a safe bet that it was birthed in the back of a dimly lit kitchen by a curious/bored chef likely wearing polyester." Will Fulton - ThrillList
Sounds likely to me.
Then there are the variations. The first of which is the mozzarella stick. Indeed in America when you say cheese on a stick I think you are probably talking about mozzarella sticks, which are not 'on' a stick, but which are a stick themselves. I'm not even sure they have cheese on a stick like the Australian lady makes - where you start with a stick of a cheddar like cheese, coat it in bread or batter and deep fry it. The mozzarella sticks look like this:
"Lightly breaded, they have a light, crisp crunch and are filled with that superlative, stretchy mozz that has probably launched a thousand Instagrams."
Looks like they're served with tomato sauce. And I guess you could make a 'gourmet' version with handmade buffalo mozzarella and fancy bread, and fancy things to dip it in.
There are thousands of variations of cheese on a stick - here are just a few:
From top left to bottom right you have a kind of cheese biscuit on a stick, mozzarella and jalapeño stack, a Mexican version with chilli and lime and babybel cheeses on a stick. As you can see if you try hard enough you can make the concept look classy - or, at the very least, cute.
In America they have a food on a stick day!
