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Pineapple Souffle
Cream 1 1/2 tablespoons each Crisco and flour, add 1 cup canned grated pineapple and juice. Cook 5 minutes, remove from fire, add little salt, 1 tablespoon lemon juice, and 3 beaten egg yolks. Bake in Criscoed dish 20 minutes. Serve with following sauce: Cook 2 tablespoons creamed Crisco in double boiler, add 2 yolks of egg, 1 at a time, beat, and add 4 tablespoons sugar, 2 tablespoons orange juice, 1 teaspoon lemon juice, and 1/2 cup whipped cream. Serve hot.
A Crisco-era dessert soufflé that is really a thick pineapple custard with a hot sabayon sauce. Two things in the original need attention before you start: no oven temperature is given, and the egg whites are never mentioned.
- The missing whitesThe recipe calls for three yolks and never says what to do with the whites, yet calls the result a soufflé. As printed it bakes into a dense pineapple custard. If you want any lift, beat the three whites to soft peaks and fold them into the cooled pineapple base just before it goes into the dish.
- Oven temperatureUnstated. A moderate oven, 350F, for the 20 minutes given; with whites folded in, bake in a greased 1-quart dish and check at 20 minutes for a set edge and a barely trembling centre.
- CriscoCrisco is vegetable shortening, the product this whole book was written to promote. Any neutral solid fat works; butter improves both the base and the sauce, and "creamed Crisco" simply means the fat beaten soft, not melted.
- Canned pineapple, not freshUse canned as specified. Fresh pineapple contains bromelain, a protein-digesting enzyme notorious for stopping gelatin setting and capable of interfering with an egg-thickened mixture. Canning heat destroys it, which is why the tinned fruit is the reliable choice here.
- The baseThe creamed fat and flour with pineapple and juice is a thick roux-bound purée. Cook it the full five minutes to lose the raw flour taste, then let it cool below scalding before the yolks go in, or they will scramble in streaks.
- The sauceA warm yolk-thickened sauce in the sabayon manner, enriched here with creamed fat and lightened with whipped cream. Keep the water below a simmer, add the yolks one at a time as directed, and take it to 160F on an instant-read thermometer, thick enough to coat a spoon; much hotter and it risks curdling. Fold the whipped cream in off the heat and serve at once, as it will separate on standing.
- YieldNo yield is given. One cup of pineapple and three yolks makes four modest servings, with sauce for the same number.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble, which introduced Crisco in 1911 as the first widely marketed all-vegetable hydrogenated shortening; the book is built around the product, and its recipes call for Crisco in place of butter and lard. The pineapple is the other commercial marker: canned Hawaiian pineapple, grated or sliced, had become cheap and ubiquitous in American kitchens by the 1910s, and cookbooks of the period put it into salads, fritters and puddings with enthusiasm. "Soufflé" was used loosely in this era for any baked dish lightened with beaten egg, and here the term is stretched further still, since the printed instructions never call for the whites to be whipped or folded in at all.