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Cheese Ramekins
4 tablespoons flour, 3 tablespoons Crisco, 1/2 cup milk, 3 whole eggs, 1 white egg, salt, white pepper, and red pepper to taste, and 1/2 cup grated cheese. In saucepan, mix Crisco and flour over fire, when smooth stir in milk, and cook until thick, add seasonings; mix well. Remove pan from fire, add yolks eggs 1 by 1, mix each thoroughly, then mix in cheese, and fold in stiffly beaten white egg. Pour into Criscoed ramekins, and bake in hot oven 15 minutes. Serve hot.
A small cheese soufflé baked in individual dishes, built on a thick panade rather than a thin béchamel. The method is sound; only the units, the oven language and one ambiguous egg count need translating.
- The egg count is ambiguousThe list calls for "3 whole eggs, 1 white egg," but the method uses only yolks and then folds in "stiffly beaten white egg." It can be read either as 3 yolks with all four whites beaten, or as 3 yolks with only the single extra white; the singular in the method leaves it open.
- "Hot oven"Roughly 400 to 425F. Fifteen minutes at that heat suits small ramekins of about 4 oz; larger dishes will need longer and may still be loose in the centre at 15.
- CriscoThis is a Procter & Gamble promotional book, so shortening appears everywhere. Butter makes a better roux and a better flavour here, in the same quantity, and butter is also what you want for greasing the dishes.
- Red pepperCayenne, not paprika and not chilli flakes. A pinch is enough; its job is to sharpen the cheese, not to be tasted as heat.
- The cheese"Grated cheese" in a book of this date would most often have been a firm aged Cheddar, though Italian grating cheese also appears in such recipes. Half a cup of either works; avoid anything young and wet, which will weep oil into the batter.
- The hingeThe pan must be off the heat before the yolks go in, and cool enough that they thicken rather than scramble. Beat each one in fully before the next, then fold the whites in with a light hand — the mixture is stiff and it is tempting to stir, which flattens it.
- Bake and serve at onceFill the dishes and get them into the oven immediately; a batter left standing loses its lift. These sink within a few minutes of leaving the oven, which is why the original says simply "serve hot."
- YieldAbout four 4-oz ramekins, enough for four as a first course or a light supper dish with salad.
A Calendar of Dinners belongs to a genre of cookbook that was really advertising: Crisco, introduced by Procter & Gamble in 1911, needed to persuade cooks that a hydrogenated vegetable shortening could stand in for butter and lard everywhere, so the company issued menu-and-recipe books in which the product appears throughout, even as a verb ("Criscoed ramekins"). The dish itself is older and French in ancestry: ramequin originally described a small cheese preparation baked or toasted, and only later did the word migrate in English to the little fireproof dish it was baked in. By the 1900s cheese ramekins were a standard item in American and British household cookery — a soufflé mixture scaled down to individual portions.