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Cheese Ramekins
Use two tablespoons of grated cheese.; one tablespoon of butter; two tablespoons of bread crumbs; four tablespoons of milk; one-fourth teaspoon of mustard; one-fourth teaspoon of salt; one-eighth teaspoon of pepper; one egg. Boil the crumbs in the milk until soft, and add the butter, mustard, salt, pepper and cheese and the yolk of the egg. When all are well mixed, stir in the white of the egg, beaten to a stiff froth. Put the mixture in china cases, filling each case but three-fourth full, and bake five or six minutes. The ramekins should be puffed high above the edge of the case, and should be served immediately, else they will fall. They make a pretty cheese course for dinner. CLABBER (This is Thickened Milk) - This dish is perfection in the summer when milk sours and thickens quickly. Serve it very cold. A nice way is to pour the milk, before it thickens, into the glass dish it is to be served in; when thickened set it on ice for an hour or so. Serve on sauce plates or small dishes with powdered, granulated or maple sugar, and a little grated nutmeg, if liked.
Two things need saying: the caution above applies to the clabber note appended at the end of the page, not to the ramekins themselves, which are a sound little cheese soufflé. The ramekin quantities are also far smaller than they look on the page.
- Why the clabber note fails todayClabber is milk left at room temperature until wild lactic bacteria set it into curd. It worked in the era of raw-milk dairying because raw milk carried a dense native lactic flora that often outcompeted spoilage organisms — inconsistently, which is why raw-milk dairy was a well-documented vehicle for tuberculosis, brucellosis, salmonella and listeria. Pasteurised milk left to sit will generally spoil rather than clabber, and raw milk deliberately held warm for hours is never brought to any temperature that kills a pathogen. Use a current cultured-dairy recipe if you want the dish.
- YieldAs written this makes roughly two small ramekins — a single serving apiece for a cheese course. For four to six people multiply everything by three, keeping one whole egg per two tablespoons of cheese.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. A five-to-six-minute bake with visible puffing implies a hot oven; somewhere around 425F is a reasonable modern reading, but the figure is an inference, not the book's. Preheat fully and put the filled cases on a baking sheet so you can pull them all at once.
- "China cases"Small individual porcelain dishes — what we now simply call ramekins, the dish having given its name to the vessel rather than the other way round. Butter them; three-quarters full is right, as the beaten white does the rest.
- MustardDry mustard powder, not prepared mustard. A quarter teaspoon in this volume is assertive, which is the point — it sharpens the cheese rather than tasting of mustard.
- The cheeseA dry, well-aged grating cheese: sharp cheddar or Parmesan. Fresh or young cheese carries too much water and will loosen the mixture.
- The hingeCook the crumbs and milk to a thick paste, then let it cool to warm before the yolk goes in, or the yolk scrambles. Fold the stiff white in with a light hand and get the dishes into the oven immediately — the instruction to serve at once is not a flourish, these collapse within a minute or two of leaving the heat.
Ramekin began as a name for a preparation, not a pot: seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English cookery used the word for a small dish of toasted or baked cheese — its origin is often traced to the Dutch rammeken, though the derivation is uncertain — and only later did the word attach itself to the little china case it was cooked in. By the time the book appeared, cheese ramekins were associated with the savoury cheese course served late in the meal, borrowed from English practice. The clabber note that follows on the same page belongs to an entirely different world: a farm-kitchen use for milk that had turned before it could be drunk, common across the American South and Midwest and generally recorded as a summer dish, when souring was fast and unavoidable. The two sitting side by side is a fair picture of what a household manual of that period had to serve — the formal course and the thrifty makeshift, on facing halves of the same page.