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Cheese Ramequins (Put four tablespoonfuls)
Put four tablespoonfuls of butter and half a cup of water into a saucepan. When these boil, add half a cup of flour and a few grains, each, of salt and paprica; cook and stir until the mixture cleaves from the pan. Turn into a mixing-bowl and beat in two ounces of grated Parmesan cheese; then beat in, one at a time, two eggs. On a wellbuttered baking-sheet shape the paste into flat circular pieces about an inch in diameter. Brush over the tops with beaten egg, diluted with one or two tablespoonfuls of milk or water, and put three or four dice of cheese on each. Bake about fifteen minutes. Serve very hot.
This is a cheese choux paste — the same dough as cream puffs, savoury — and the original omits the one thing a modern cook most needs: an oven temperature.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives none, as was common when cooks judged their own ranges. For choux, a hot start (around 425F) to get the lift, then a drop to about 375F so they dry out and hold their shape; note the original allows only about fifteen minutes' baking in total, so for one-inch pieces keep the total close to that.
- The hinge: dry the panade"Cook and stir until the mixture cleaves from the pan" is the whole technique. Keep the pan on the heat and beat until the paste balls up and leaves a faint film on the bottom, about two minutes. Too wet and the puffs collapse; there is no fixing it later.
- Cool before the eggsLet the paste stand off the heat two or three minutes before beating in the eggs, or they will scramble. Beat each one in completely before adding the next.
- Butter measureFour tablespoonfuls is 2 oz, half a stick. Period tablespoon measures were not always identical to modern ones, but this is close enough to work as written.
- Ramequin, not ramekinHere the word means the little cheese pastry itself, not the porcelain dish. Nothing is baked in a mould.
- Parmesan and the diced cheeseTwo ounces of Parmesan is roughly half to three-quarters of a cup grated, depending on how finely. The recipe does not say what the dice should be; Gruyere or a firm cheddar browns well.
- Size and yieldOne-inch rounds are bite-sized. Piped or spooned, half a cup of flour yields roughly 24 to 30 puffs. Space them well — they double.
- Serve very hotMeant literally. They soften within minutes of leaving the oven. If made ahead, crisp them at 350F for five minutes before serving.
Choux paste turns up under various names in turn-of-the-century American cookery, and "ramequin" was one used for the savoury cheese version — a borrowing from French usage, where ramequin long referred to a small cheese preparation before the word migrated to the dish it was baked in. What is described here is close to what a French cook would call a gougere, though the diced cheese pressed on top is the sort of flourish associated with American chafing-dish and luncheon cookery of the 1900s.