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Souffle, Cream
Take three yolks of eggs, three table-spoonfuls of flour, and one table-spoonful of maraschino; mix them together, and add a pint of cream. Beat up four whites of eggs to a strong froth, and stir them in. Bake in a case or mould, and sift pounded sugar over.
A short, oddly lean formula even by the standards of Cassell's, which assumed the reader already knew what a soufflé should look and behave like. The gaps worth filling are the oven, the vessel, and the sugar.
- The hinge: fold, don't stirThe instruction to "stir them in" is period shorthand for folding. Cut the beaten whites through the cream base in two or three additions with a spatula, stopping while streaks are still faintly visible; beating them in flattens the foam and you will get a sweet baked custard rather than a soufflé.
- A pint is an imperial pintCassell's is a British book, so a pint here is 20 fl oz, not the American 16. That is a lot of liquid against three yolks and three spoons of flour — the mixture is closer to a loose batter than a modern stiff soufflé base, and it will rise gently rather than tower.
- Give the oven a numberNo temperature is stated. A soufflé of this kind wants a moderate oven, 350–375°F, on a low shelf, for roughly 30–40 minutes in a single dish. Bake until the top is set and browned and the centre only just trembles.
- "A case or mould"The case is a stiff paper or pleated soufflé case, the mould a straight-sided china or metal dish. A modern 1½-quart soufflé dish, buttered and dusted with sugar so the mixture can climb, serves the same purpose. Individual ramekins will need about 15–20 minutes.
- Pounded sugarSugar crushed fine in a mortar — caster sugar, or icing sugar if you want it to disappear on the surface. It is sifted over at the end, off the heat, not before baking.
- Sweetening the baseThe recipe sugars only the top, relying on the maraschino for flavour. Maraschino liqueur is sweet, but a single tablespoon in a pint of cream will not carry the dish; two to three ounces of sugar stirred into the base will suit most modern palates.
- MaraschinoThe liqueur distilled from Marasca cherries, dry and faintly bitter-almond in character — not the syrup from a jar of bright red cocktail cherries, which is a twentieth-century American product and will taste wrong here.
- Serve at onceThe original gives no yield. Reckon on four to six as a dessert, and carry it straight from the oven to the table; a soufflé of this looseness collapses within a few minutes.
This belongs to the cream and sweet soufflés that closed a nineteenth-century dinner, a genre that came into English cookery from French practice and largely stayed with cooks trained in it — the soufflé was widely regarded as a test of a cook's skill. The flavouring points to the same world: maraschino, made around Zadar on the Dalmatian coast and widely imitated elsewhere in Europe by the 1800s, was a fashionable confectioner's liqueur, used to scent creams, ices and jellies where a modern cook would reach for vanilla or kirsch. The brevity of the entry is itself informative. A dictionary of cookery assumed its reader could judge an oven by hand, knew how long a mould of this size wanted, and needed only the proportions.