No. 658

Choux with Cheese Garnishing

Garniture de Choux au Fromage

Prepare a pate-a-chou with three gills of water, half a pound of flour, a quarter of a pound of butter, a pinch of salt and a pinch of sugar, when dry mix into the paste five or six eggs one after the other and finish with a handful of grated cheese. Make round choux laying them on a baking tin a short distance apart, either with a pocket or a spoon, egg the surfaces and dredge over with parmesan; bake in a good but slackened oven. When dry, remove and leave till partly cold, then open the sides and fill each one with a spoonful of cheese fondue (No. 2954). Dress on a napkin or around a remove.

← No. 657 Chipolata Garnishing Garnishings No. 659 Cock's-Combs Garnishing a la Colbert →

For the Modern Kitchen

A straightforward cheese gougère used as a garnish rather than a course of its own. Ranhofer assumes you can read choux paste by feel, so the two things worth pinning down are the weights and the oven.

Three gills of waterA gill is half a cup, so this is 1 1/2 cups (about 350 ml). With half a pound of flour (227 g, roughly 1 3/4 cups) and a quarter pound of butter (113 g), the ratio is standard choux.
"When dry"This refers to the panade stage: after the flour goes in, keep the paste moving over heat until it pulls away from the pan and leaves a thin film behind. Skipping this is what produces flat, damp puffs.
Five or six eggsEgg sizes were not standardised in the period, so treat the count as approximate. Beat in four to start, then add the rest in fractions until the paste falls from the spoon in a thick ribbon. Stop when it does, whatever the count.
"A good but slackened oven"Ranhofer gives no figures; the phrase reads as a hot oven moderated rather than fierce. Starting hot and then dropping the heat to dry the interiors suits the paste; allow roughly 25-30 minutes for puffs the size of a walnut, judging by colour and dryness rather than the clock.
Do not open the door earlyThe hinge of the whole recipe. The steam that lifts the paste escapes the moment the oven is opened, and a half-set puff collapses and will not recover.
Parmesan, then and nowRanhofer names parmesan only for dredging the tops; the "grated cheese" worked into the paste is unspecified, and Gruyere or a similar firm cheese is a reasonable choice. Use the real aged article, not the powdered sort, which will not brown properly.
The fillingHis No. 2954 cheese fondue is not reproduced here; in period usage a "fondue" of this kind is generally a thick cheese-and-egg-bound preparation rather than melted cheese with wine. A stiff Mornay, cooled slightly so it holds its shape, does the same job.
Yield and useThis quantity should give several dozen small puffs. A "remove" is the dish that replaced another in the course order, so these were banked around a roast or braise, or piled on a folded napkin as a side dish.

A Little History

This comes from Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the enormous compendium he assembled after some three decades as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and its placement in the Garnishings chapter says a good deal about how grand-service cooking worked. A dish did not arrive alone: it arrived ringed with something, and the kitchen kept a repertoire of interchangeable borders numbered for quick reference, cock's combs one side, cheese puffs the other. The puffs themselves are what French kitchens know as gougeres, cheese worked into ordinary pate a choux, a preparation traditionally associated with Burgundy, where it was eaten with wine. Ranhofer treats it purely as architecture. The instruction to "dress on a napkin" is a period convention, the folded linen absorbing fat and keeping the pieces from sliding on the silver.