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Cornstarch Souffle
Bring 1 quart milk and 1 tablespoon Crisco to boiling point; beat 4 tablespoons cornstarch with 1 cup sugar, yolks of 5 eggs together and add to hot milk. Stir and cook 8 minutes, then add 1/4 teaspoon salt and 1 teaspoon vanilla extract. Pour into Criscoed fireproof dish. Beat up whites of eggs to stiff froth, then beat in 4 tablespoons sugar, pour over top of pudding and brown lightly in oven.
This is a stirred cornstarch pudding under a meringue rather than a true soufflé — nothing is leavened by the whites, and it will not rise or fall. A few notes on the vessel, the fat and the browning.
- CriscoThe book was written to sell it. One tablespoon of any neutral solid or liquid fat works; unsalted butter gives a better flavour in a sweet pudding. "Criscoed dish" simply means greased.
- Fireproof dishA 2- to 3-quart ovenproof baking dish; the pudding alone comes to about a quart and a half before the meringue. The pudding goes in hot and only needs the oven long enough to colour the meringue, so glass, stoneware or enamelled cast iron all serve.
- Mix the starch coldBeat the cornstarch, sugar and yolks to a smooth slurry before it meets the milk, and add it in a thin stream while whisking. Dumping it into boiling milk gives lumps that no amount of stirring will undo.
- The eight minutes matterCornstarch thickens well before it is cooked out. Hold it at a bare simmer, stirring constantly, for the full eight minutes or the pudding will taste chalky and may thin again as it stands.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given; many ranges of the period had no thermometer. A moderate oven, around 350F, and long enough to colour the meringue -- roughly 10 to 15 minutes -- browns it and heats the whites through, which a brief blast under a broiler does not.
- The meringueFive whites with only 4 tablespoons sugar is a soft, lightly sweetened meringue. Beat to soft peaks first, then add the sugar a spoonful at a time, and spread it so it touches the rim of the dish all round to stop it shrinking away.
- YieldA quart of milk and five eggs feeds six to eight. Serve warm or at room temperature; it weeps if refrigerated overnight under the meringue.
This comes from one of the promotional cookbooks Procter & Gamble commissioned after introducing hydrogenated vegetable shortening in 1911, and the brand name appears in the text as both noun and verb — "pour into Criscoed fireproof dish" — which seems to have been much of the point of the exercise. The dish itself is older than the fat: a cornstarch blancmange or "cornstarch pudding" was a staple of nineteenth-century American cookery once cheap refined cornstarch became widely available, and topping a custard or starch pudding with the leftover whites, beaten and browned, is often said to have been the usual domestic answer to the question of what to do with five egg whites. Calling it a soufflé was a common flourish of the period, the word apparently being used loosely for anything with beaten whites on or in it, whether or not the thing ever rose.