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Serve (Bake Cheese Souffl mixture)
Bake Cheese Soufflé mixture in ramequin dishes. Serve for a course in a dinner.
This is a cross-reference rather than a full recipe: it sends you back to the book's Cheese Soufflé and only changes the vessel and the place in the meal. A few things worth knowing before you divide the batter among ramekins.
- "Ramequin dishes"Individual straight-sided porcelain or earthenware cups, typically 4 to 6 oz. Butter them well and, for extra lift, dust the buttered interior with grated hard cheese or fine dry crumbs so the batter has something to climb.
- Oven heatThe recipe gives none; soufflé mixtures of this kind are usually baked in a moderate oven. Any Fahrenheit figure is a modern gloss, not the book's own instruction.
- Timing scales down sharplyTiming scales down -- individual ramekins set considerably faster than a full soufflé, so begin checking well before a large one would be done. They are ready when puffed and set at the edge with a faint wobble at the center.
- Fill only three-quartersThe mixture roughly doubles. Overfilled cups spill and then collapse.
- Water bath optionalSetting the ramekins in a pan of hot water gives a softer, custard-like interior and more forgiveness on timing; baked dry on a sheet they rise higher and brown more.
- Serve at onceThe instruction to serve it as a dinner course assumes the cook can time it to the minute. A soufflé begins to fall soon after it leaves the oven, so have the table seated before it comes out.
Ramekin here means the dish, not the cheese preparation, though the two senses were long tangled: ramequin in older English and French cookery was a baked cheese-and-bread or cheese-and-egg savory, and the small fireproof cup is generally said to have taken its name from it. Terse cross-references of this kind, in which one master mixture is redirected into a different vessel and a different point in the menu, are characteristic of period cookbooks, and reflect the elaborate multi-course dinner in which a hot cheese dish in individual cups could stand as a course of its own, or turn up near the end in the English manner as a savory before dessert.