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Cheese Ramequins No.1
1/4 pound of pastry 1 ounce grated cheese Make the pastry from the recipe for tarts. Roll out the pastry very thin; sprinkle over it half the grated cheese, fold the pastry again, and roll out an inch thick. Sprinkle the rest of the cheese.
Stamp it into small rounds with a small pastry cutter, fold the pastry again, and roll it out into an inch thick. Bake in a quick oven, and serve hot piled on a dish.
A two-ingredient cheese savoury built on layered scraps of tart pastry. The written sequence is garbled, and one measurement is almost certainly a printer's slip.
- Read the order backwardsAs printed, you stamp out rounds and then fold and re-roll the pastry, which would destroy the rounds. The intended sequence is: roll, cheese, fold, roll, cheese, fold, roll thin, then stamp. Cut last.
- "An inch thick"Ambiguous at best and probably an error for a quarter inch. Puff-type pastry rolled a full inch thick will not bake through in a hot oven before the outside colours; roll to about 1/4 inch for the final sheet.
- A quick ovenA hot oven, somewhere in the region of 400-450F. These want fast heat so the layers lift and the cheese browns rather than weeps.
- 1/4 pound of pastryAbout 115 g. The tart pastry recipe it refers to is not reproduced here; whatever the fat, keep the dough cold between rolls so the layers stay distinct.
- The cheeseOne ounce is about 1/4 cup grated. Use a dry, hard, well-flavoured cheese: Parmesan, aged Cheddar, dry Gruyere. Young or high-moisture cheese releases water into the layers and the pastry goes limp.
- Yield and timingSomething in the range of a dozen to two dozen small rounds, depending on the size of the cutter, baked 10-12 minutes until puffed and golden. They are at their best within minutes of leaving the oven.
- ServingPiled hot on a dish, these are a savoury course or a pre-dinner bite rather than a substantial dish. As a meat substitute they need soup or a salad alongside.
Ramequin (now usually spelled ramekin) originally named a cheese preparation, not the little dish it is baked in; the word is usually traced to a Flemish or Low German term, the underlying sense given variously as cream or as toasted cheese, and English cookbooks from the eighteenth century onward use it for small cheese pastries and cheese custards. The porcelain pot took the name later, from the vessel these things were served in. Its appearance here under "Meat Substitutes" is characteristic of the meatless-cookery genre, which circulated in Britain and America both before and during the First World War, when households were urged to keep meatless days: cheese, eggs and pulses carried the protein, and the older repertoire of savouries was recruited to fill the gap. A recipe calling for a quarter pound of tart pastry and an ounce of cheese also says something about the economics of the moment.