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January 7
Menu: Clam Cocktail; Boiled Salmon with Parsley Butter; Roast Duck, Olive Sauce; and Fried Hominy; Riced Potatoes French Peas; Creamed Salsify Celery Mayonnaise; Cheese Ramekins; Banbury Tarts Coffee Cheese Ramekins-4 tablespoons flour, 3 tablespoons Crisco, 1/2 cup milk, 3 whole eggs, 1 white egg, salt, white pepper, and red pepper to taste, and 1/2 cup grated cheese. In saucepan, mix Crisco and flour over fire, when smooth stir in milk, and cook until thick, add seasonings; mix well. Remove pan from fire, add yolks eggs 1 by 1, mix each thoroughly, then mix in cheese, and fold in stiffly beaten white egg. Pour into Criscoed ramekins, and bake in hot oven 15 minutes. Serve hot.
This is a small cheese souffl hat dthing that goes into the oven puffed and comes out of it falling. The panade base and the beaten whites are the whole method; everything else is seasoning.
- Hot ovenIn period usage roughly 400-450F; around 425F suits individual ramekins for the fifteen minutes given. A single larger dish will need longer, perhaps 25 to 30 minutes.
- CriscoA vegetable shortening, in 1913 hydrogenated cottonseed oil; it is still sold under the same name, though the present formulation is not the same fat. Butter works at least as well here and tastes better with cheese; use the same 3 tablespoons.
- The egg count is ambiguousThe original calls for "3 whole eggs, 1 white egg," then has you beat in the yolks and fold in "stiffly beaten white egg." Read literally that gives 3 yolks and 4 whites, which is what makes the mixture climb. Beating only the one extra white and discarding three would be odd and would give a heavy result.
- Red pepperThis means cayenne, not paprika and not chilli flakes. A pinch is enough; its job is to sharpen the cheese, not to register as heat.
- The hinge: fold, do not stirThe panade must cool to warm before the yolks go in, or they will scramble in the pan. Then fold the whites in with a light hand in two additions. Beaten out, the mixture will not rise, and nothing later in the process recovers it.
- CheeseA dry aged cheese behaves best here: sharp Cheddar, Gruy ere or Parmesan, or a mix. Very fresh or high-moisture cheese weeps fat into the batter.
- Filling the dishesGrease the ramekins well and fill them no more than two-thirds. Six 4-oz ramekins is about right for this quantity, serving six as a first course or three or four as a light supper dish.
- Serve at once"Serve hot" is not politeness. These begin to sink within two or three minutes of leaving the oven, so have the table ready before they go in.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was written by Marion Harris Neil, cookery editor of the Ladies' Home Journal, for Procter & Gamble, which had introduced Crisco -- hydrogenated cottonseed oil -- in 1911 as an all-purpose substitute for butter and lard. The "Calendar of Dinners" section, from which this January 8 dish comes, was a common device in promotional cookbooks of the period: it relieved the housekeeper of deciding what to cook while ensuring the new product appeared in nearly every menu, savoury and sweet alike. The ramekin itself is older and unrelated to the brand; the word comes from the French ramequin, which originally denoted a cheese preparation rather than the small dish it was baked in, and English cookbooks had been printing "ramakins" of toasted cheese and egg since the eighteenth century. What is characteristic of 1913 is the assumption that a household would own half a dozen matching individual dishes and would put a hot souffl on the table for an ordinary Wednesday.