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Ramequin Puffs
Make the cheese fritter paste of the foregoing receipt. Cut some manilla paper in broad ribbands, and brush them over with a little melted lard.
Form the paste in ring shapes on these papers, by pressing it out of a paper cornet, or a sack.
These are not slender rings, but more like flat cakes with a depression in the centre.
Draw the bands of paper through the hot frying-fat and the puffs will slip off. They should be fried of a light color. Drain, then split them as you would muffins, and spread between some creamed cheese or fondue. Dredge a little gra ed cheese on top, and set the pan containing them in the top of the oven for two minutes before serving. Care is required in forming the shapes not to have them too large, as they expand considerably.
A cheese choux paste piped into flat rings, deep-fried, split and filled with a soft cheese mixture. The technique of piping onto greased paper and sliding the shapes into the fat is sound and still the easiest way to get an even ring into hot oil.
- The base pasteThis depends entirely on the cheese fritter paste in the preceding entry, most likely a choux-type paste with grated cheese, judging by the way these are piped and expand. Without that recipe in front of you the instructions here cannot be followed.
- Manilla paperA tough buff-brown paper of the sort once used for wrapping. Cut-to-size parchment strips do the same job and take the greasing just as well.
- Paper cornet or sackA rolled paper cone or a cloth piping bag. A piping bag with a plain tip of about half an inch gives the right thickness for a ring that puffs rather than bursts.
- Frying temperatureThe recipe gives no temperature. Fried choux is generally taken at a moderate frying heat rather than a fierce one; the instruction to fry them a light color points the same way.
- SizeThe warning about expansion is the hinge. Pipe the rings small, no more than two inches or so across; the recipe is explicit that they expand considerably and that oversized shapes are the risk.
- FondueIn this period the word means a soft melted-cheese and egg mixture used as a filling or savoury, not the communal pot of Swiss cheese and wine. Any thick creamed cheese preparation serves.
- Top of the ovenThe upper part of the oven, for two minutes only, just to melt the dredged cheese. The recipe specifies no temperature, and longer exposure will dry the fried shells.
- Yield and servingServing -- No yield is given, since the quantities belong to the preceding paste recipe. These are a hot savoury course or an accompaniment to soup, and they collapse quickly, so fill and serve them at once.
"Ramequin" in nineteenth-century kitchen English meant a cheese preparation, not a dish: baked, fried or spread on toast, the word covered a family of hot cheese savouries whose derivation is often traced through French cookery to a Germanic root, though the etymology is not settled. Only later did the name migrate to the small ovenproof mold such things were often baked in, which is how most cooks meet the word now. Piping choux onto greased paper and letting the shapes float free in the fat was a standard practice, a way for one worker to turn out dozens of identical rings quickly, and the same trick is still used for fried crullers and beignets.