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Cheese Ramequins
4 tablespoons grated cheese 2 tablespoons butter 1/2 cup milk 2 egg yolks, 3 egg whites 1/2 cup bread crumbs 1/4 teaspoon mustard 1/4 teaspoon salt 1/8 teaspoon pepper Cook the milk and bread together until smooth, stirring often. Add cheese and butter, and remove from the fire. As soon as the butter has melted stir in the beaten yolks of eggs and seasonings. Let cool a little before adding the stiffly beaten whites. Bake in buttered ramequins for twenty minutes in a moderate oven. Serve at once.
A small cheese soufflé built on a bread panade rather than flour, from the era when "ramequin" meant both the dish and the little baked cheese custard inside it. It is straightforward provided the whites go in last and the dishes go straight to table.
- Oven temperatureA moderate oven is usually reckoned at around 350–375°F. At that heat, individual ramekins of this size will be set and puffed in about the twenty minutes the recipe allows; larger dishes need longer and will fall faster.
- Serve at once means itThis is the hinge. With three whites to two yolks the mixture rises well and collapses within a few minutes of leaving the oven. Have the plates and the eaters ready before you bake.
- The cheese"Grated cheese" here is unqualified; a firm, dry aged cheese such as a sharp Cheddar or a Parmesan-type grating cheese suits the method. Four tablespoons is roughly an ounce, so the cheese flavour is restrained by modern standards; doubling it is reasonable if you also loosen the panade slightly.
- Bread crumbsThe recipe does not say which kind; stale bread ground fine works better here than a soft fresh crumb or the sandy commercial crumb sold today. The milk and crumbs should cook down to a thick, smooth paste that pulls from the side of the pan.
- MustardAlmost certainly dry mustard powder, the usual sense of an unqualified "mustard" in American recipes of this kind. Prepared mustard would add vinegar and thin the base.
- Folding the whites"Let cool a little" matters — a hot base will slacken the beaten whites. Cool to warm, then fold in two additions rather than stirring.
- Vessels and yieldButtered ramequins here means small ovenproof china cups; roughly 4-ounce ones suit the quantity, which should fill about four to six of them.
Ramequins arrived in English-language cookery from French, where ramequin is generally said to have described a small baked cheese preparation before it came to name the dish it was baked in — the same drift that turned the casserole from a pot into its contents. Cheese ramequins are often described in American cookery of the period as an entrée: a course served between fish and roast, or as a savoury at the end of a formal dinner in the English manner. The bread-and-milk base rather than a flour roux is the older technique, a panade of the sort used for quenelles and forcemeats, and it made a soufflé possible in a household with stale bread on hand. That flour-milling companies published such recipes at all is part of the point: the cook books were promotional.