Home › The Principles of Cookery › Ground Rice Souffle
Ground Rice Souffle
Mix three ounces of ground rice smoothly with half a pint of new milk or cream. Put it into a saucepan, with two ounces of fresh butter, a quarter of a pound of sugar, a pinch of salt, and the thin rind of a lemon, half an inch of cinnamon, or any flavouring that may be preferred. Stir quickly over the fire until the milk boils, pour it into a basin, and when cool, add the yolks of three eggs, well beaten. Butter a plain mould--and it is well to tie round it a band of white paper, also well buttered, which should be a good deal higher than the mould itself, so that if the batter rises much in the oven, it may not fall over the sides-Whisk the whites of five eggs to a firm froth, and add them the last thing. Beat the mixture for fully ten minutes after the whices are added. Bake in a quick oven, and serve as soon as the dish is taken from it. Have a hot napkin ready to pin round the dish in which the souffl was baked, and let a heated salamander, or red-hot shovel, be held over it in its passage from the kitchen to the dining-room. Time to bake, twenty minutes. Probable cost, 1s., if made with milk. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A hot sweet souffle built on a ground-rice base rather than a flour panada, which makes it slightly grainier and considerably more forgiving than a classic bechamel souffle. Two instructions in the original are worth ignoring.
- Do not beat for ten minutesThis is the one line to disregard. Ten minutes of beating after the whites go in would collapse every bubble you whisked into them. Fold the whites through the base in three additions with a spatula, stopping while a few streaks remain.
- Ground riceMilled rice, traditionally a slightly coarser grind than modern rice flour, but not rice grains and not the coarse cream-of-rice cereal. Rice flour from an Asian grocer is the closest match. Three ounces is about 85 g, or roughly half a cup.
- Half a pint of new milkImperial measure, so 10 fl oz, about 1 1/4 US cups or 285 ml. "New milk" means fresh whole milk straight from the dairy, as opposed to milk that had stood and been skimmed; ordinary whole milk is the equivalent.
- A quarter pound of sugar115 g, which is a great deal for this quantity of base and reflects Victorian taste. Half that gives a souffle that still sets and tastes of lemon rather than syrup.
- Remove the flavouringsThe lemon rind and cinnamon stick are infusion aromatics only. Fish them out before the yolks go in, or you will be picking bark out of the finished souffle.
- Cool before the yolksThe rice base thickens to a stiff paste as it cools. Let it drop to warm rather than cold, then beat the yolks in hard; a fully cold base is difficult to loosen and the whites will tear it rather than fold into it.
- A quick ovenBroadly 400-450F in the period's terms. For a souffle of this size, 400F (200C) is the practical setting, with the shelf low enough that the paper collar clears the roof of the oven. Twenty minutes, as given, suits a mould of roughly 6 inches.
- The paper collar and the salamanderThe buttered band of paper is still standard technique and still worth doing; parchment or foil tied with string does the job. The salamander was an iron plate heated red and held over food to glaze the top, and the red-hot shovel was the improvised version. A blowtorch or a few seconds under a hot grill achieves the same browning, though a souffle carried at speed to the table needs neither.
- YieldFive or six as given, which is accurate if it is following a full dinner. As a standalone dessert, four.
Ground rice occupied a particular niche in the nineteenth-century English kitchen: cheaper than arrowroot, blander than semolina, and considered gentle enough for invalids and children, it turned up in puddings, moulds and cheap blancmanges throughout the period. Using it as the base for a souffle is a thrifty substitution for the flour-and-butter panada of the French method, and the "probable cost, 1s." that the recipe appends is the point of the exercise. The Cassell's cookery series, enormous late-Victorian compilations running to thousands of entries, routinely gave both a cost and a number of servings so that a mistress or cook could budget a dinner from the page. The instruction about the red-hot shovel is a reminder that the top of a souffle had to be kept and glazed, and that kitchens were often a long walk from the dining room.