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Fried Ramequins
1/4 pound Gloucester cheese Cayenne and salt 1 ounce butter 1 ounce crushed nuts 1 teaspoon chopped parsley Mix the grated cheese, with melted butter, nuts and add the seasoning. Put on pieces of bread in a well buttered frying pan, have the pan very hot, and fry five minutes. Serve at once.
A cheese-on-fried-bread savoury from the era when "ramequin" meant the cheese mixture, not the china dish. It comes together in minutes, and the only real difficulty is getting the cheese to melt before the bread burns.
- The hinge: pan heat"Have the pan very hot" and "fry five minutes" work against each other — buttered bread in a very hot pan is dark in two minutes. Use medium heat, cover the pan so the trapped heat melts the topping, and pull the slices when the underside is golden, around three to four minutes.
- Gloucester cheeseSingle or Double Gloucester, a firm cow's milk cheese from Gloucestershire. Double Gloucester is the orange-gold one and is widely available; Single Gloucester is paler. A sharp English cheddar or Red Leicester melts in much the same way.
- Weights1/4 pound of cheese is 4 oz, roughly a packed cup once grated. One ounce of butter is 2 tablespoons; one ounce of nuts is a scant 1/4 cup chopped.
- The nutsNo variety is specified. Walnuts or hazelnuts suit the cheese; toast them first, since five minutes in the pan will not develop much flavour.
- The parsleyIt appears in the ingredients and then vanishes from the method. Stir it into the cheese mixture, or scatter it over at the table where it stays green.
- The breadCut it about half an inch thick from a firm white loaf. Thin sliced sandwich bread collapses under the butter before the cheese has softened.
- SeasoningCayenne with cheese is the standard Victorian savoury pairing and is meant to be assertive — a good pinch, not a dusting. Salt lightly; the cheese carries most of it.
- YieldProbably enough topping for about four slices of bread, serving two as a light supper or four as a savoury course. It should go to the table immediately; melted cheese on fried bread turns leathery as it cools.
"Ramequin" (now usually ramekin) entered English cookery from French — it turns up in English cookery writing in the early eighteenth century, in Massialot translations and dictionary entries of the 1700s — meaning a hot cheese preparation, often baked or fried on a piece of bread or pastry; the little straight-sided dish took the name only much later, from the vessel such mixtures came to be baked in. Recipes of this kind sit at the older end of the English savoury tradition, alongside Welsh rarebit and cheese straws, dishes served at the close of dinner or as a light supper. Its appearance here under "Meat Substitutes" reflects the logic of early twentieth-century vegetarian and wartime-economy cookery: cheese and nuts were understood as the direct nutritional stand-ins for meat, and books of this sort seem often to have worked by taking familiar savouries and pressing them into service as main dishes.