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Corn-Flour Souffle Pudding
Put six ounces of corn-flour into a saucepan, with eight ounces of pounded sugar, and mix both together with a quart of milk. Add four ounces of fresh butter, a pinch of salt, and a few drops of essence of vanilla. Stir briskly until it boils, and then work in vigorously the beaten yolks of six eggs. Whisk the whites of the eggs to a firm froth, and incorporate them lightly with the batter, which must then be poured into a slightly-buttered pie-dish, and baked in a moderate oven for about half an hour. Sprinkle the top with powdered sugar, and send to table quite hot.
A Victorian cornstarch soufflé pudding — closer to a baked pastry cream than a true soufflé, and considerably sweeter and stiffer than a modern cook would expect. A few translations make it work.
- Corn-flour is cornstarchBritish "corn-flour" means what American shops sell as cornstarch, not cornmeal and not finely milled maize flour. Six ounces is roughly 1⅓ cups.
- The quartIf the source is British, this is an imperial quart — 40 fl oz, about 1.14 litres, or 5 US cups. Using a 32 oz US quart will give a noticeably stiffer paste.
- Pounded sugarSugar crushed fine in a mortar; caster or superfine sugar is the direct equivalent. Eight ounces is a generous cup and makes a distinctly sweet pudding by current taste — it can be cut to 5 or 6 oz.
- Moderate oven350°F / 175°C. Half an hour suits a shallow dish; a deep pie-dish will want closer to 40 minutes, until the centre is just set with a slight wobble.
- The hinge: temper before you foldThe boiled cornstarch base is very thick and very hot. Beat the yolks in off the heat, then let it cool for several minutes before the whites go in, or they will cook on contact and you lose the lift entirely. Fold in a third of the whites to slacken the base, then the rest lightly.
- Stirring the baseSix ounces of starch in a quart of milk sets fast and scorches faster. Whisk the starch and sugar into the cold milk before any heat is applied, and keep the whisk moving across the pan bottom as it thickens.
- Essence of vanillaA period essence, often alcohol-based and variable in strength. For this quantity of milk, 1 to 2 teaspoons of modern vanilla extract is a workable amount for 'a few drops'.
- Dish and yieldA buttered 2-quart / 2-litre baking dish. Serves six to eight. It rises modestly and sinks within minutes of leaving the oven, which is why the original insists it go to table hot.
Cornstarch reached British kitchens in quantity in the second half of the nineteenth century, promoted hard by manufacturers as a cheap, reliable thickener for the middle-class household, and cookery writers of the period obliged with dozens of blancmanges, moulds and baked puddings built on it. This one borrows the language of the French soufflé — separated eggs, whipped whites, a pie-dish, service "quite hot" — but the structure is a starch-set pastry cream rather than a true egg-and-air soufflé, which is precisely why it survives the trip from oven to table better than the real thing.