Home › The Principles of Cookery › Souffle, Carrot
Souffle, Carrot
Make a thick puree of carrots, but instead of broth use water, in which put a little sugar, half a table-spoonful of flour, a little salt, and a good bit of butter; let all this boil till very thick, then add the yolks of four eggs, and mix all well together. The moment you are ready to send up, beat the whites of the eggs, which throw in with the rest, and put into the oven for a proper time in the vessel which you wish to use. This souffl is not in great favour, but it is good.
A vegetable soufflé of the plainest Victorian sort, and one where the original leaves most of the numbers to the cook. The purée is the whole dish: if it is even slightly loose, the soufflé will not climb.
- Quantities are not givenNo weight of carrots is stated. Four eggs suit roughly a pound of carrots, which cooks down to about 1 1/2 cups of very stiff purée. Reckon on 2 tablespoons butter and the half tablespoon of flour named in the text.
- "Thick" means dry, not merely stiffBoil the purée down until a spoon dragged across the pan leaves a track that holds. Carrots are watery, and residual moisture is a chief reason this style of soufflé collapses or weeps.
- Oven heatThe text gives none; for a soufflé of about this quantity a modern oven of 375-400F suits. Reckon "a proper time" as roughly 25-30 minutes for a single dish, 12-15 for individual ramekins; it is done when the top is set and the centre still trembles.
- Cool before the yolksThe text moves straight from boiling to yolks. Let the purée drop below scalding first or the yolks will scramble in threads through it.
- The whitesBeat to soft peaks, not stiff, and fold in two additions with a light hand. The instruction to do this only "the moment you are ready to send up" is sound: a folded mixture left standing loses its lift within minutes.
- Sweet or savouryThe sugar, salt and butter put this between the two, though the text asks only for "a little sugar". Keep it to a teaspoon or so and it stays a vegetable side dish; more sugar would push it toward an entremets. Carrots are sweet enough to go cloying.
- The dish"The vessel which you wish to use" means an ovenproof dish deep enough for the rise, buttered and, if you like, dusted with fine crumbs for grip. Do not fill above three-quarters.
- Yield and servingServes four as an accompaniment. Carry it to the table straight from the oven; there is no holding a soufflé of this kind.
Cassell's is unusual here in admitting that a dish "is not in great favour" — the vogue for soufflés in the later nineteenth century seems to have carried the technique well beyond its obvious candidates, and not all of them repaid it. The method itself is French: a thickened base bound with yolks and lightened with beaten whites, apparently codified in professional kitchens earlier in the century and then carried into English middle-class cookery by books like this one, which was compiled as an alphabetical dictionary around the 1870s and reissued for decades. Carrots were an obvious candidate because they were cheap, available most of the year, and sweet enough to sit on either side of the sweet-savoury line — Victorian cookery treated them freely as both, and carrot appears in period puddings and tarts as readily as in soups. The direction to use water rather than broth, with sugar added, tips this version toward the dessert end without committing to it.