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Cheese Ramekin
Put one cup of bread crumbs and one gill of milk on the fire to boil. Stir and boil until smooth. Then put in four tablespoons of grated cheese, a little piece of butter, and salt and pepper. Stir till the cheese is dissolved, then remove from the fire. Beat two eggs, the yolks and whites separately. Stir the yolks into the mixture and then the whites of the eggs. Put in a pudding dish and bake fifteen or twenty minutes. Mrs W. G. Trowbridge.
A Really Digestible Welsh Rarebit Melt one tablespoon of butter, add one-fourth of a teaspoon of salt and paprika, half a teaspoon of dry mustard and one-third of a cup of ale or beer.
Stir constantly, and when hot put in half a pound of cheese cut into small pieces.
As it gradually melts it may thicken, for no cheese is exactly alike in the amount of liquid it requires. If it seems too thick, add more beer. If the rarebit is preferred creamy instead of stringy, add one beaten egg just before serving. The paprika in this recipe makes the cheese mixture perfectly digestible. If the regulation toast is not at hand for serving rarebit, pour it over saltines.- I. G. C.
Two cheese dishes share this page: a baked crumb-and-cheese pudding in the French ramequin style, and a rarebit built on beer. Both are quick, and both hinge on keeping the cheese off high heat.
- A gillOne gill is half a cup, 4 fl oz. With one cup of crumbs it makes a very stiff paste; fresh soft crumbs absorb less than dry ones, so add milk by the spoonful if the mixture will not come smooth.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given; ranges of the period were rarely fitted with reliable oven thermometers. A moderate oven, around 350F, for the stated 15 to 20 minutes, until puffed and just set in the centre. It behaves like a small souffle and will sink as it cools, which is expected.
- "Ramekin" hereIn American books of this period the word (ramequin) can mean the cheese preparation itself as well as the small dish. The recipe accordingly says pudding dish; small individual dishes will want a shorter bake.
- The cheese"Grated cheese" is left unspecified; a firm aged Cheddar or a dry American factory cheese would suit. Four tablespoons is roughly 1 oz — modest. For a rarebit, half a pound of a well-aged Cheddar melts best; pre-shredded cheese carries anti-caking starch and turns grainy.
- Folding the whitesLet the crumb base cool to warm before the yolks go in, or they will scramble in streaks. Fold the beaten whites in with a spatula rather than stirring, and get the dish into the oven at once.
- Rarebit heatKeep the pan below a simmer once the cheese goes in. Boiling breaks the emulsion and the cheese ropes into strings in a pool of fat. The dry mustard may help hold the mixture together as well as season it, whatever the recipe says about paprika.
- The egg in the rarebitBeaten egg stirred in off the heat gives the creamy version, but it also needs a moment of gentle cooking to thicken. Add it at the end over low heat and stir until the mixture coats the spoon.
- On the digestibility claimPaprika does not make cheese digestible; that idea belongs to a period preoccupation with dyspepsia. Ignore it and season to taste.
- YieldThe ramekin serves two as a light supper dish or four as a savoury course. The rarebit, at half a pound of cheese, covers four slices of toast.
Both recipes sit in the long Anglo-American tradition of the cheese "savoury" — a hot cheese dish served at supper or at the close of dinner rather than as a main course. The baked version takes its name from the French ramequin, a cheese-and-bread preparation that English cookery had absorbed by the eighteenth century and that gave its name, eventually, to the small dish it was baked in. Welsh rarebit (recorded in the eighteenth century as "Welsh rabbit", the "rarebit" spelling a later genteel correction) was a fixture of American chafing-dish cookery around 1900, when the chafing dish was the fashionable equipment of late-night entertaining in clubs and college rooms. The insistence that this one is "really digestible" reflects an era of relentless anxiety about rich food, when melted cheese was widely blamed for nightmares and indigestion — a belief that produced a whole subgenre of recipes promising to have solved the problem. Both contributions are signed, one with a name and one with initials, which marks this as a community-contributed collection.