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Cheese Pastry, Ramequins Of
Take some good puff paste. Any that is left after making pies, tarts, etc., will answer the purpose. Roll it out lightly, and sprinkle over it nicely-flavoured grated cheese. Fold the paste in three and sprinkle every fold with the cheese. Cut little shapes out with an ordinary pastry cutter, brush them over with the beaten yolk of egg, and bake in a quick oven. Serve them as hot as possible. Time to bake, ten minutes. Probable cost, 10d. for half a pound of paste. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A scrap-pastry savoury that still works exactly as written; the only real variables are the cheese and the oven.
- "Quick oven"425–450°F (220–230°C). Puff paste needs that initial blast to lift; a slack oven gives greasy, flat biscuits. Bake on a heavy sheet lined with parchment.
- Ten minutes is rightSmall shapes at that heat colour in 8–12 minutes. Pull them when the tops are deep gold — cheese in the layers browns faster than plain pastry and goes bitter if pushed.
- "Nicely-flavoured" cheeseThe phrase is left open, but a dry, sharp hard cheese (mature Cheddar, Cheshire, or Parmesan) suits it best. Young or wet cheeses (mozzarella, mild supermarket Cheddar) release water and steam the layers apart. Grate finely so the folds still seal.
- Ramequin, not ramekinHere the word denotes the cheese-pastry itself, the older usage; the little ovenproof dish that now carries the name took it from such preparations rather than the other way round.
- The foldingSprinkling cheese, folding in three, sprinkling again is a single extra turn on already-laminated paste. Keep it cold and work fast; if the butter softens the cheese will fuse the layers rather than separate them.
- Egg washYolk alone gives the deepest colour but sets quickly — beat it with a teaspoon of water or milk so it brushes thinly. Keep it off the cut edges or the layers glue shut and will not rise.
- Rest before bakingNot in the original, but chill the cut shapes 15–20 minutes. Re-rolled trimmings especially will shrink and twist otherwise.
- Yield and servingHalf a pound (225 g) of paste makes a couple of dozen small rounds or so, depending on the cutter, which the book reckons enough for three or four as a savoury. They are meant to be eaten straight from the oven; a few minutes in a hot oven revives leftovers, but they will never be as good cold.
Cheese pastries of this kind belong to the Victorian and Edwardian savoury — the small hot dish served after the sweet at dinner, before dessert proper, a course peculiar to British tables and largely gone by the mid-twentieth century. Cassell's places the recipe among its economies as much as its niceties: it begins with leftover puff paste, and the costing of tenpence for half a pound reflects a household in which trimmings were counted rather than thrown out. The French ramequin, anglicised as "ramekin", meant in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cookery books a cheese preparation — baked, toasted, or in pastry — and the transfer of the word to the small china dish such things were sometimes cooked in appears to have come later, though just when is not easily fixed.