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Pastry Ramakins
Roll out evenly and thinly a quarter of a pound of good puff-paste. Sprinkle over it a little finely-grated Parmesan, fold, roll it again, and sprinkle a little more cheese upon it; then roll it out once more, stamp it into any fancy shapes, and brush over with yolk of egg. Put the remakins on a buttered baking-tin, and bake them in a brisk oven. Serve as hot as possible. These remakins should be served with cheese. Time, about a quarter of an hour to bake. Probable cost, 6d. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A cheese savoury of the simplest kind: puff paste laminated with Parmesan, cut small and baked hard. Two points decide whether it works — keeping the paste cold, and getting the oven properly hot.
- "Ramakin" is not the dishIn Victorian usage a ramekin (spelled variously here, including the book's own "remakins") was a small hot cheese preparation served at the end of dinner, not the porcelain pot. No baking dish is required; these are baked flat on a tin.
- A brisk ovenRoughly 425F, though period usage of "brisk" is loose and sources put it anywhere from about 400 to 450F. Puff paste needs high heat so the water in the layers turns to steam before the butter melts out; too slow an oven tends to give flat, greasy biscuits. The recipe's quarter of an hour suits small shapes at that sort of heat.
- QuantitiesA quarter of a pound of puff paste is 4 oz / about 115 g — a small quantity, and one sheet of a standard 500 g pack of all-butter frozen puff will more than cover it. The cheese is deliberately unmeasured; a light dusting at each of the two folds, perhaps 1 oz total, is enough to flavour without preventing the layers from sealing.
- ParmesanGrate it as finely as the recipe insists. Coarse shreds sit between the layers and stop the paste rising, and the exposed pieces scorch. Anything wetter than a hard aged cheese will make the paste soggy.
- Keep it coldTwo extra rolls with cheese added are two more chances for the butter to soften. If the paste starts to feel greasy or the layers begin to smear, chill it flat for twenty minutes before the final roll and stamping.
- Egg washYolk alone gives a deep colour but sets quickly; loosen it with a teaspoon of water or milk. Brush the tops only — egg running down the cut edges glues the layers together and blocks the rise.
- Yield and servingThree or four as written, eaten with the cheese. They are worth eating within minutes of leaving the oven; they go leathery as they cool and do not reheat well.
These belong to the English savoury — the small, hot, salty course served after the sweet and before the dessert fruit, a fixture of the later nineteenth-century dinner and largely an English habit rather than a French one. The name is generally traced to the French ramequin, which in older French cookery meant a baked cheese preparation of exactly this sort; only later did the word migrate in English to the little fireproof dish such things were often baked in, which is why a modern reader meets "ramekin" as a piece of crockery first. The instruction that they "should be served with cheese" most likely just places them in the cheese course.