Home › A Calendar of Dinners › Date Souffle
Date Souffle
Stone and chop 1/2 pound dates and cook them in 1/2 cup boiling water, mashing until smooth. Add 1 tablespoon melted Crisco, stiffly beaten whites 5 eggs, 1/4 cup sugar, 1 tablespoon lemon juice, and salt to taste. Pour into Criscoed souffle mold and bake until brown, or 25 minutes. Serve cold with boiled custard or whipped cream.
A meringue-based soufflé with no yolks, no flour and no dairy in the batter, which makes it lighter and more fragile than most. The original gives no oven temperature, so that is the first gap to fill.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives none. A moderate oven, in the region of 325-350F, suits it: at the stated 25 minutes the top will brown and the centre will just set; hotter and the meringue puffs violently, then collapses.
- CriscoCrisco was new when this book was published, and the recipe exists partly to sell it. Any neutral solid or liquid fat works — melted butter gives a better flavour in a dessert like this. "Criscoed mold" simply means greased.
- The datesHalf a pound of pitted dates is roughly 1 1/2 cups packed. Modern Medjools are moister than the dried, pressed dates likely meant here, so start with a scant half cup of water and add more only if the paste will not mash smooth. It should be a thick, spreadable puree, not a sauce.
- Cool the paste firstThis is the hinge. Hot date purée will deflate and partly cook the beaten whites on contact. Let it come to barely warm, then fold the whites in in thirds with a spatula, stopping while streaks are still faintly visible.
- WhitesFive whites is about 150 g. Beat to firm but not dry peaks — over-beaten whites break into grains and will not fold into a dense fruit paste.
- Serving coldUnusual for a soufflé, but deliberate: without yolks or a béchamel base this sets to something closer to a baked date meringue, which holds its shape as it cools rather than sinking to nothing. Expect some settling regardless.
- YieldAbout a 1½-quart mold, serving five or six. The boiled custard called for is a stirred pouring custard (crème anglaise), not a baked one.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and published by Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening the company introduced in 1911; the branded fat appears in nearly every recipe, here in a single tablespoon that the dish would scarcely miss. Period cookbooks commonly organised their chapters by principal ingredient rather than by course, and five whites was a real consideration in a kitchen that had to find a use for the yolks. Dates themselves were a familiar pantry staple in American households by this date, arriving dried and pressed from North Africa and the Persian Gulf, cheap enough to sweeten a pudding that uses only a quarter cup of sugar of its own.