Home › The Principles of Cookery › Macaroon Souffle
Macaroon Souffle
Dissolve four ounces of finely-powdered sugar in a small tea-cupful of cream, add two table-spoonfuls of brandy, and pour it, when on the point of boiling, over a quarter of a pound of macaroons. Have ready six eggs, well beaten, yolks and whites separately, stir the yolks with an ounce of good fresh butter in bits into the mixture when cool, and when ready to bake, mix the frothed whites of the eggs. Serve hot from the oven before the egg can fall. Time, twenty minutes to bake. Probable cost, 1s. 7d. Sufficient for a small dish.
A hot pudding built on crushed almond macaroons soaked in brandy-laced cream, lightened with whipped whites. The instructions assume a cook who already knows how a soufflé behaves, so the two things left unsaid are the oven temperature and the dish.
- The hinge: fold, then bake at onceThe whites go in only "when ready to bake", and the batter must go straight into a hot oven. Any standing time and the foam deflates before the egg protein has set.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A soufflé of this size wants a steady 375F (190C) on a preheated baking sheet or in the lower third of the oven; twenty minutes at that heat gives a set edge and a soft centre.
- MacaroonsVictorian macaroons are the crisp almond-and-egg-white biscuits, not coconut haystacks and not French macarons. A quarter pound is about 115g; crush them coarsely so some texture survives the soaking. Amaretti are the closest supermarket substitute.
- A small tea-cupfulRoughly 5 fl oz, about two-thirds of a cup. This is a genuinely elastic measure in Victorian books; the aim is enough hot cream to soften the biscuits to a thick paste, not to drown them.
- Finely-powdered sugarCaster sugar, or superfine. Modern icing sugar contains cornflour and will thicken the cream differently.
- Cool before the yolksThe cream mixture must come down to warm at most. Yolks stirred into near-boiling cream will scramble, and the butter should melt slowly into it rather than split.
- The dishNo vessel is specified. A buttered and sugared soufflé dish or deep pie dish of about 1.5 pints (roughly 850ml) suits this quantity; "sufficient for a small dish" suggests something in the region of four modest servings, though the book gives no number.
- Serving"Before the egg can fall" is literal. Carry it from oven to table and spoon it out immediately; it will sink within a few minutes, as all soufflés do.
Cassell's ran to thousands of entries and assumed a household cook working from a repertoire rather than a shopping list, which is why the almond macaroons here are treated as a pantry staple: they were a confectioner's line that kept well in a tin, and crushed macaroon turns up repeatedly in period recipes as a way of giving body and almond flavour to creams, charlottes and puddings without grinding nuts. The soufflé reached British kitchens from French practice during the nineteenth century, and is usually associated with the French-trained professional cooks employed in large households; by the time this dictionary appeared it was a familiar test of a cook's timing rather than a novelty. The brandy, the cream and the fresh butter mark it out as a dish for company, and the stated cost of 1s 7d, printed here as it is throughout the book, let a mistress of the house check the expense against the result.