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Cherry Souffle
4 tablespoons flour, 2 tablespoons Crisco, 1/2 cup milk, 1 teaspoon vanilla, 3 whole eggs and 1 additional white, 4 tablespoons sugar, and 4 tablespoons chopped preserved cherries.
Put Crisco and flour in saucepan, mix over fire, add milk, stir till it boils and becomes thick; remove from fire to cool 10 minutes, and sugar, yolks eggs, 1 by 1 stirring each thoroughly, whites stiffly beaten up, then add chopped cherries. Pour all into Criscoed souffle mold. Put into saucepan with 1/2 an inch of boiling water. Put lid on saucepan and steam gently 3/4 hour. Turn out, send to table with jam sauce round.
This is a steamed soufflé pudding built on a thick flour panada, not the airy baked soufflé the name now suggests. It is more forgiving than a baked one, but the folding and the steam level still decide the outcome.
- The hinge: fold, don't stirThe instructions say to stir each yolk in thoroughly, and that is right — but the stiffly beaten whites must be folded in with a spatula in two or three additions. Stirring them into the heavy panada collapses the only lift the pudding has.
- CriscoCrisco is still sold, and any solid vegetable shortening behaves the same way here. Butter works and tastes better; use 2 tablespoons either way, and butter the mold rather than "Criscoing" it.
- "Mix over fire"This means cook the fat and flour together over medium heat for a minute or two before the milk goes in, so the paste loses its raw taste. It will be very stiff — a 4:2:1/2-cup ratio of flour to fat to milk gives a paste, not a sauce, which is what holds the eggs.
- A missing word"Remove from fire to cool 10 minutes, and sugar, yolks eggs" appears to be a printer's slip; read it as "add sugar, add yolks." Cool the paste to warm before the yolks go in or they will scramble.
- Preserved cherriesMost likely cherries put up in syrup, though candied or maraschino-style cherries would also answer; in any case not fresh. Drain and blot them well and chop them small; wet fruit sinks and leaves a soggy seam at the bottom.
- The mold and the steamingUse a 1-quart pudding basin or charlotte mold, filled no more than three-quarters. Half an inch of boiling water in a lidded saucepan will run dry over 45 minutes — check at 25 minutes and top up with boiling water, keeping the heat low enough that it barely trembles.
- DonenessAfter 45 minutes the pudding should be set to the center and just shrinking from the sides; a skewer comes out clean. Rest it 5 minutes before turning out or it may tear.
- Jam sauce and yield"Jam sauce" here is simply cherry or raspberry jam warmed with a spoonful or two of water until pourable, poured around the base rather than over the top. Serves four.
This comes from a genre of cookbook that barely exists now: the branded promotional cookery book. A Calendar of Dinners was published by Procter & Gamble to sell Crisco, the hydrogenated vegetable shortening the company introduced in 1911, and recipe after recipe in it names the product — hence the verb "Criscoed" for greasing a mold. The dish itself is older than the shortening: a steamed souffle pudding on a flour-and-milk panada is standard nineteenth-century English and French domestic practice, sturdier and less anxious-making than a baked souffle, since it can sit over gentle water while the rest of dinner is finished. Calling it a souffle rather than a pudding reads as a bit of menu elevation, and the preserved cherries point to a well-stocked store cupboard rather than to any particular season.