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Mixed Vegetable Souffle
1 tablespoonful Crisco 1/4 lb. cooked carrots 1/2 lb. boiled potatoes 3/4 lb. boiled turnips 1/2 lb. stewed onions 1 tablespoonful chopped parsley Salt and pepper to taste 3 eggs Chop onions, add vegetables mashed, then mix well, add Crisco, seasonings, and yolks of eggs. Beat up whites of eggs to stiff froth and fold them into mixture, then turn it into Criscoed fireproof dish and bake thirty minutes in moderate oven.
A vegetable purée lightened with beaten whites rather than a true béchamel-based soufflé — it rises modestly and settles quickly, so plan to serve it straight from the oven.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350F by modern reckoning. Thirty minutes suits a shallow dish; a deeper one will need longer.
- CriscoThe book is a Procter & Gamble promotional cookbook, hence the branded shortening throughout. Butter gives a better result here — one tablespoon in the mixture, plus enough to grease the dish.
- Weights, not volumesThe vegetables are weighed after cooking: 1/2 lb potato, 3/4 lb turnip, 1/4 lb carrot, 1/2 lb onion. That comes to about 2 lb of cooked vegetable, or roughly 4 cups of mash.
- Dry the mashThe hinge of the dish. Turnip and onion both hold a great deal of water, and a wet purée will not hold air. Drain everything well and return the mashed vegetables to a dry pan over low heat for a few minutes to steam off moisture before adding the yolks.
- Fold, then bake at onceFold the whites in three additions with a light hand and get the dish into the oven immediately. A vegetable base this heavy loses volume fast if it stands.
- Season harder than you think"Salt and pepper to taste" is doing real work with this much bland root vegetable. Grated nutmeg and a handful of sharp cheese are period-appropriate additions if you want more.
- Fireproof dishAny 1 1/2 to 2 quart baking dish or straight-sided casserole. Butter it thoroughly, including the rim, so the mixture can climb.
- YieldServes four to six as a side dish, or four as a light supper with bread and a salad.
This comes from one of the cookery books issued to promote Crisco, the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening put on the American market in 1911 — which is why a tablespoon of it appears in a dish where an earlier cook would likely have used butter or drippings. The recipe itself is thrift cookery dressed in French clothes: a souffle in name, but really a way of turning leftover boiled roots into something that arrives at the table looking deliberate. Vegetable souffles of this kind appear regularly in Anglo-American middle-class cookery books from the late nineteenth century onward.