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Diablotines à la Gruyère (II)
(Cheese Savoury Devilled.) Ingredients.
Two Eggs. Salt and Cayenne. Half a pound of ordinary Pastry.
One gill of Milk.
One ounce of Butter.
Half an ounce of Cornflour.
Three ounces of grated Gruyère.
The book gives quantities only; the method is left to the cook, as was common in professional recipe collections where the technique was taught in class. What follows is what the ingredient list tells you and where the older terms need translating.
- What the ingredients implyMilk, butter and cornflour in these proportions make a very stiff panada — essentially a thick white sauce — into which the grated cheese is stirred off the heat. The pastry is for small cases or rounds that carry it. Nothing here is a batter or a dough enrichment.
- A gillIn a British book of this period a gill is a quarter of an imperial pint, 5 fl oz or about 140 ml, not the American half-cup (4 US fl oz). Half an ounce of cornflour to that much milk gives a paste thick enough to stand up in a spoon.
- CornflourBritish cornflour is American cornstarch, not fine-milled maize flour. It sets harder and clearer than wheat flour and will thicken almost instantly once the milk is at a simmer; it also needs a full minute of boiling to lose its raw taste.
- Ordinary pastryThe book does not define the term; in a collection of this sort it most likely means the house short pastry rather than puff. Half a pound would make roughly a dozen to eighteen small rounds.
- Devilled"Devilled" in a savoury of this date means cayenne, and often mustard as well. The list omits any seasoning, so season the cheese mixture yourself with salt, cayenne and a little grated nutmeg or the result is flat.
- OvenThe book gives no oven direction. If you bake small short-pastry cases of this kind, a hot oven is the usual modern choice, and filled diablotines need only long enough to colour once the cases are baked blind.
- The hingeAdd the Gruyère after the panada comes off the heat and stir only until it melts. Boiled cheese in a cornflour base turns stringy and oils out, and three ounces to a gill of milk is a high proportion of cheese to carry.
- Yield and servicePerhaps twelve to eighteen pieces, on the estimate above. As a savoury they were sent to table very hot, at the end of dinner after the sweet, and they collapse quickly as they cool.
Diablotine is a French diminutive meaning roughly "little devil"; in British cookery of this period the "devilled" label generally signals cayenne, mustard or both, as in devilled kidneys and devilled bones. (In French usage diablotins also covers small cheese croutons served with soup, so the name is not exclusively a devilled one.) The dish belongs to the savoury course, a distinctly British institution of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in which a small, hot, salty mouthful followed the sweet and preceded dessert proper. Cheese savouries did much of the work in that slot, and Gruyère was a common choice for a cooked cheese mixture because it melts smoothly and holds its flavour against pepper, with Parmesan more usual for dusting and gratins. That this entry is a bare ingredient list may simply reflect a book written for pupils who had been taught the panada method separately. The "(II)" suggests a second version, with the method possibly given under the first.