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Genoa Ramekins
Use either individual baking dishes or one large shallow dish; earthenware is in this case preferable to agate or tin. Cut stale bread in two inch slices, freeing it from crust. Have ready a raw custard made with 2 eggs, a pinch of salt and dash of pepper to each pint of milk; also have some grated cheese. Lay the bread on a platter and pour over it the custard, basting until as much liquid as possible has been absorbed.
Transfer carefully to the buttered dishes, fitting them in nicely. Cover the top of each piece with an inch layer of grated cheese, dusting it with a very little salt and pepper. Place in a slow oven until the custard sets and cheese melts; it may be necessary to cover for a part of the time if the oven is hot. This dish may be made still more nutritious by scooping a slight hollow in the center of each piece of soaked bread (when in the dish), dropping in I raw egg then covering with the cheese. This is delightful.
A savory bread-and-custard bake, closer to a strata than to anything we now call a ramekin. The custard is deliberately thin, so the bread must do the absorbing before it ever reaches the oven.
- "Ramekins" means the food, not the potIn this period a ramekin (from the French ramequin) was a baked cheese preparation; the small round dish took its name from it later. Individual earthenware dishes, straight-sided ovenproof cups, or one shallow gratin dish all work.
- Earthenware for a reasonThe recipe gives no reason for preferring earthenware to agate (enameled metal) or tin, but the likely one is heat: thin metal can drive the custard to a boil at the edges, where it curdles. Stoneware or glazed earthenware heats more slowly and evenly.
- Slow oven300 to 325F. Anything hotter and the eggs set into a grainy, weeping custard before the cheese has properly melted. Expect 30 to 40 minutes for individual dishes, longer for one large one.
- The custard ratioTwo eggs per pint of milk is a loose, barely-set custard by modern standards, which is what you want here since the bread supplies the body. A pint is 2 cups. Seasoning is light and comes in two stages, a pinch of salt and dash of pepper in the custard and a very little more dusted over the cheese, so salt it properly.
- Soak the bread thoroughlyThis is the hinge. Two-inch slices of genuinely stale, close-grained bread need repeated basting and several minutes to take up the custard to the center. Under-soaked bread bakes into a dry seam in the middle with soggy edges.
- An inch of cheese is a lotRead it as a generous, completely opaque blanket, roughly a half cup of grated cheese per portion. A firm dry grating cheese such as Gruyere browns well; fattier aged Cheddar can oil out, and young pre-shredded cheese tends to separate.
- Covering the topIf the cheese is coloring before the custard has set, lay foil or a lid over the dishes for the middle of the baking and remove it for the last ten minutes.
- The whole-egg versionAn egg dropped into a hollow and buried under cheese will not be visible, so judge by time: give it an extra 10 to 15 minutes and check that the white is opaque and firm. If a set yolk matters to you, that version is easier to control baked uncovered.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield. One pint of custard and roughly half a dozen slices of bread will fill about that many individual dishes. It works as a supper dish in its own right with a sharp salad, not as a side.
This comes out of the strand of household cookery that treated cheese as the poor household's meat, and stale bread as a resource rather than a leftover. Eggs, milk and cheese together supply the protein of a meat course at a fraction of the price of one, and the author's aside that the dish can be made "still more nutritious" with an extra egg is exactly that reasoning. The name looks decorative rather than documentary: nothing in the method points to any particular Ligurian ancestry. "Ramekins" is the older usage, in which the word named a baked or toasted cheese dish before it named the little pot it was baked in. The technique itself, bread steeped in seasoned egg and milk and then baked, is shared with savory strata and bread pudding.