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ORANGE SOUFFLE (another way)
Mix a dessert-spoonful of flour very smoothly with half a pint of new milk or cream. Add the eighth of a small nutmeg, grated, a table-spoonful of orange-flower water, and the thin rind of a sweet orange. Put the mixture into an enamelled saucepan, and stir it over the fire until it boils. Strain through coarse muslin, and when nearly cold add four eggs well beaten, two table-spoonfuls of brandy, and a heaped table-spoonful of orange marmalade. Stir briskly for two or three minutes, pour the souffle into a buttered mould, and place the mould in a cloth, without tying it, in a saucepan of boiling water, being careful only that the water in the pan is not sufficiently high to flow into the mould. Pin a hot napkin round the mould before serving, and sprinkle pounded sugar over the souffle. Time to boil, three-quarters of an hour. Probable cost, 8d., exclusive of the brandy. Sufficient for four or five persons.
Despite the name, this is a steamed custard pudding rather than a risen soufflé — the eggs go in whole and beaten, not separated and folded. Expect something closer to a delicate baked custard with a scented orange perfume.
- The hinge: add the eggs to a cool baseThe instruction "when nearly cold" is the whole recipe. Beaten whole eggs stirred into hot thickened milk will curdle into sweet scrambled egg, and there is no rescuing it. Let the strained milk come down to barely warm before the eggs go anywhere near it.
- MeasuresA dessert-spoonful is roughly two teaspoons, about 10 ml of flour. Half a pint imperial is 10 fl oz, a shade under 1¼ US cups. "New milk" is simply fresh whole milk, unskimmed and unsoured; cream gives the richer version.
- The enamelled saucepanProbably specified because reactive pan linings can discolour milk and pick up a taint from citrus. Any modern stainless or nonstick pan does the same job.
- Rind, not zest"The thin rind" means pared strips of peel with no white pith, steeped in the milk for flavour and then strained out.
- Orange-flower waterStill sold, usually in Middle Eastern groceries and better supermarkets. Modern bottles vary greatly in strength; a tablespoon of a concentrated brand will overwhelm the dish, so taste the cold base and scale back if it reads as soapy.
- The mould in a cloth, untiedThe cloth cushions the mould against the pan base and stops it rattling; the recipe simply directs that it not be tied. Butter the mould well and fill it no more than three-quarters full. Keep the water below the rim of the mould, as the recipe insists, and top up with boiling water as it evaporates.
- Time and donenessThree-quarters of an hour at a bare simmer is about right for a pint-sized mould, but judge by feel: the centre should be just set and a skewer come out clean. Kept at a hard boil the custard will curdle and weep.
- ServingFour to five portions, as the original says. "Pounded sugar" is caster or superfine sugar. The hot napkin pinned round the mould was a Victorian nicety for bringing it to table still steaming; a warmed serving dish does as well.
In Victorian usage "soufflé" covered a much wider field than it does now, taking in any light egg-thickened sweet, steamed as well as baked — and this "another way" version is a boiled pudding in all but name. Its flavourings are older than the book: orange-flower water and brandy in a milk custard belong to a line of English scented creams and "orange puddings" running back into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when distilled flower waters were a standard part of a well-stocked still-room. By the time Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery appeared in the later nineteenth century, orange marmalade was cheap enough to be a stock cupboard item rather than a luxury, which is why a spoonful of it can be dropped in here as casually as jam. The costing — eightpence, brandy excluded — is typical of the book's habit of pricing each dish.