Soak 6 ounces of bread-crumbs in milk and press dry; add 2 ounces of butter mixed with 3 ounces of sugar and 3 ounces of chocolate; add the yolks of 6 eggs well beaten, and flavor with a teaspoonful of vanilla; add the whites beaten to a stiff froth. Bake in a quick oven and serve at once.
July 9 — No. 9
English
This is a hot chocolate soufflé built on a base of soaked bread rather than flour, a common Victorian and Edwardian trick for a pudding that rises but does not collapse quite so fast. The recipe assumes a cook who knows the unwritten steps, so a few need spelling out.
- The hinge: fold, do not stirThe whites are the only leavening in the dish. Beat them to a stiff but not dry froth and fold them into the chocolate base in two or three additions with a light hand; if they are beaten down, the pudding bakes into a dense chocolate brick.
- Weights, not cupsEverything here is by weight: 6 oz breadcrumbs is roughly 3 cups of fresh soft crumbs (not dried), 2 oz butter is 4 tablespoons, 3 oz sugar is a scant half cup, 3 oz chocolate is three squares of the old baking blocks.
- What "chocolate" meantThe recipe says only "chocolate." In a kitchen of this period that most likely means plain block chocolate rather than a sweetened eating bar, and the modest 3 oz of sugar for six yolks is consistent with that reading. Modern unsweetened baking chocolate is the closest equivalent; semi-sweet or chips will make the pudding cloying unless the sugar is cut back.
- Melt it firstThe text says only "add ... 3 ounces of chocolate." Chop and melt it, then beat it into the creamed butter and sugar. Solid chocolate stirred into the batter will not disperse.
- Soak and pressMilk enough to cover, ten minutes, then squeeze the crumbs in your hands or a cloth until they stop dripping. Wet crumbs will weep in the oven and leave a soggy layer at the bottom.
- "A quick oven"Period sources are not consistent, but this generally indicates a hot oven, somewhere in the region of 400-450F. That is hot for an egg-set pudding: start hot for about ten minutes to get the lift, then drop to 350F for another 20-25 minutes until the center is just set with a slight tremble. Butter and sugar the dish so the batter can climb.
- Serve at once means itA souffle pudding of this kind falls within a few minutes of leaving the oven. Have the plates and any accompaniment ready before it comes out; a thin cream, a custard sauce or lightly sweetened whipped cream all suit it.
- YieldSix servings from a 1½-quart dish, or six individual ramekins baked about 18 minutes.
Baked puddings thickened with breadcrumbs run right through English cookery, from the medieval mixtures bound with bread to the nineteenth-century Cabinet and Queen of Puddings; crumbs were cheap, always to hand from the day-old loaf, and gave a softer, moister crumb than flour. Grafting chocolate onto that frame is a later refinement, dating from the period when eating chocolate and block baking chocolate became widely and cheaply available in Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century. Its place in a book that assigns a different nation to each day of the year says as much about the compiler as about England.