No. 2975

Ramekins

Ramequins

Pour a pint of milk into a saucepan, add to it five ounces of butter, and when this boils remove it from the fire, and stir in twelve ounces of flour; beat and dry it on the fire. Remove the saucepan from the range and then incorporate five more ounces of butter, also five ounces of grated parmesan, six whole eggs and two yolks, a pinch of pepper, two heaping tablespoonfuls of sugar and eight ounces of Swiss cheese, cut in quarter-inch squares; mix the whole well together, adding a little whipped cream. Have this paste the consistency of a pate-a-chou, then drop it with a round spoon on a buttered pan into balls measuring an inch and a quarter in diameter; egg them over and decorate each ramekin with thin slices of Swiss cheese put on in form of a rosette. Cook in a medium oven. As soon as done take them out and detach from the pan to dress and serve at once on a folded napkin.

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For the Modern Kitchen

This is a cheese choux paste — essentially a gougère — baked in small puffs and finished with a rosette of Swiss cheese. Ranhofer assumes you know pâte à chou, so the hinge is in the technique rather than the wording.

The hinge: dry the panadeAfter the flour goes into the boiling milk and butter, "beat and dry it on the fire" means stirring the mass over heat until it pulls cleanly from the pan and films the bottom, two to three minutes. Skip this and the paste will not carry the eggs, and the puffs collapse.
Eggs go in off the heatThe instruction to remove the pan from the range before adding butter, cheese and eggs is not optional. Let the panade cool until it is warm rather than hot before the eggs go in, or they scramble into it.
"A medium oven"Ranhofer gives no temperature; something in the region of 350 to 375F suits. Many modern choux recipes start at 425F for ten minutes and drop to 350F; a single moderate heat works for pieces this small. Bake until deeply coloured and firm, roughly 25 to 30 minutes, and do not open the door in the first fifteen.
Scale and yieldA pint of milk with 12 oz flour, 10 oz butter, 13 oz cheese and six whole eggs plus two yolks is a restaurant batch. At an inch and a quarter each it yields upwards of seventy puffs. Quartering the recipe is reasonable for a household.
The sugarTwo heaping tablespoons in a batch this size is a seasoning rather than a sweetener; it will aid browning and rounds the salt of the two cheeses. It reads oddly to modern eyes, though sugar in savoury dishes was not unusual in period cookery.
"Swiss cheese"In Ranhofer's kitchen this means Emmental or Gruyère, not processed sandwich slices. Gruyère holds its shape better as the quarter-inch dice and gives a firmer rosette on top.
"Egg them over"An egg wash: one egg beaten with a spoonful of milk, brushed thinly. Keep it off the pan, since wash pooled at the base glues the puff down and restricts the rise.
Whipped cream"A little" is deliberately vague — a few tablespoons, folded in at the end to lighten a paste already heavy with cheese. Add it last and do not beat it flat.
ServingThe folded napkin was standard service for anything fried or baked crisp; it absorbs steam. These are meant to go out within minutes of leaving the oven, and they go leathery within the hour.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of thirty-odd years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and this entry shows how the house treated a homely thing grandly. A ramequin in nineteenth-century French usage was not the little porcelain dish — that sense came later, from the vessel such preparations were baked in — but the cheese preparation itself, which folk tradition, rather than settled etymology, links to a Swiss and eastern French habit of cheese spread or baked on bread. By Ranhofer's day the word covered small hot cheese savouries of several kinds, and building one on pâte à chou puts it squarely in the family of the Burgundian gougère.