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Cheese Ramakins

A baked cheese dish made with grated bread, butter, milk, mustard, salt, pepper, and eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Cheese Ramakins

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the base

  1. Grate the bread and boil it soft in the milk.

  2. Add butter, mustard, salt, pepper, cheese, and the yolks of the eggs.

Bake and serve

  1. Beat the egg whites until frothy and fold them in last.

  2. Bake in buttered ramekins at 400°F (200°C) for 10 minutes.

  3. Serve immediately.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Cheese + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,130 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  4. Cheese + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,962 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  5. Mustard + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,430 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Whites trapped by beating lift the mixture and give the ramekins an airy, puffed structure.
Grated cheese
Melts into the base, adding richness, savoury flavour and body to the custard.
Grated bread
Soaked in milk, it thickens the base and gives a softer, more tender crumb.
Milk
Softens the bread and forms the liquid that sets with the eggs into a custard.
Butter
Adds fat for a rich mouthfeel and helps the ramekins brown at the edges.

The step that matters

Folding in the egg whites. Egg whites must be beaten until frothy, then folded in gently last. Overmixing knocks out the air that makes the ramekins rise, so they turn dense instead of light.

Swap the mustard

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cheese, butter, bread, milk, pepper, egg):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Asparagusfits better
  4. Mustardthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cheese, butter, bread, milk, pepper, egg. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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