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Souffle, Orange-Flower
Dilute a little flour with half cream and half milk; set this on the fire to boil; when the flour is done, add a little salt, a little sugar, and a small quantity of pounded orange-flowers; mix well, and then add a good bit of butter, the yolks of four eggs, and mix the whole well. Next beat six whites and mix them with the rest; then bake the souffl in the usual way, and when it is baked enough, glaze it, and send it up.
A classic panada-based souffle, written in the shorthand of a professional kitchen where the cook was assumed to know the proportions. The quantities have to be reconstructed.
- The missing measurementsNothing is quantified except the eggs. For a souffle on four yolks and six whites, a workable base is about 1 oz flour (roughly 3 to 4 tbsp) cooked into 1 cup of half milk, half cream, with 2 tbsp butter and 2-3 tbsp sugar. These are inferred from period practice, not from the text.
- Cook the flour out"When the flour is done" is the hinge. The paste must be stirred over heat until it pulls away from the pan and loses any raw, pasty smell -- two to three minutes of actual bubbling. Underdone flour gives a souffle that tastes chalky and sits heavy.
- Pounded orange-flowersFresh or candied orange blossoms crushed in a mortar, hard to come by today. Orange-flower water, sold in Middle Eastern and baking shops, does the same job: 1 to 2 teaspoons stirred into the warm base, no more, as it turns soapy in quantity.
- Yolks into a cooled baseLet the panada drop to warm before the yolks go in, or they will scramble in threads through the mixture. The butter should be beaten in first, as written -- it cools the paste and enriches it in one step.
- Six whites to four yolksThe recipe calls for two more whites than yolks, which gives lift without extra fat. Beat them to a soft peak that just holds, fold a third in to slacken the base, then fold the rest through quickly and stop while streaks are still faintly visible.
- "Bake in the usual way"The text gives no oven, dish or timing. In a modern kitchen: a buttered and sugared straight-sided dish, filled to within half an inch of the rim, in a hot oven around 400F; a quart-sized dish takes roughly 25 minutes, individual ramekins 12 to 15. Do not open the door in the first 15 minutes.
- GlazingIn Cassell's day this meant a dusting of sifted sugar flashed under a red-hot salamander iron for a few seconds. A broiler set high, with the souffle no longer than ten seconds beneath it, is the modern equivalent -- and it must happen at the moment of serving, not before.
- Yield and timingServes four as a dessert. "Send it up" is the operative instruction: a souffle begins collapsing within two or three minutes of leaving the oven, so the table should be waiting for it rather than the reverse.
Orange-flower water was one of the dominant dessert flavourings of the 18th and early 19th centuries, standing where vanilla stands now, and it survived longest in the French-derived confectionery that English cookery books like Cassell's took as their model. The souffle itself is a French professional invention, with recipes appearing in French professional cookery well before 1800, in Menon and others by the mid-18th century, and later popularised in England through chefs such as Careme and Soyer -- which is why it is written as a variation on a base the cook is expected to have already mastered. Distilled orange blossom, from bitter Seville-type orange trees, came into European kitchens by way of Arab and then Spanish and Provencal confectionery, and by the late Victorian period a bottle of it was a standard item in a well-stocked store cupboard. Pounded fresh or candied blossoms, as called for here, were the older and more expensive form.