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Tomato and Cheese Souffle
Take half a pint of fresh tomato pulp, two ounces of good cheese cut into dice, two ounces of butter, one and a half ounces of boiled macaroni in small pieces, one and a half ounces of bread-crumbs, and a good seasoning of salt, pepper, mustard, and cayenne. Put all into a saucepan, mix well, and stir until the mixture boils. Let it cool, then beat in the yolks of two eggs, and the whites of three eggs previously beaten to a stiff froth. Bake in a dish or tin that has been buttered and dredged with brown bread-crumbs. Serve very hot, and strew with grated cheese. Probable cost, 1s.
A savoury soufflé built on a cooked base rather than a béchamel, so it is sturdier than most and forgiving of a cook who has never made one. The original gives no oven temperature and no timing, which is where most of the work lies.
- The hinge: fold, do not stirThe base must be genuinely cool before the yolks go in, and the beaten whites should be cut through in two or three additions with a spatula. The recipe says "beat in", which is period shorthand; beating the whites in flat will give you a dense tomato pudding.
- Half a pint of pulpAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, a scant 1¼ US cups. Fresh pulp means tomatoes skinned, seeded and cooked down until thick — passata reduced by a third is the closest tinned equivalent. Watery pulp will not set.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. A moderately hot oven, 375–400F, suits this: hot enough to lift the whites, not so hot that the outside sets before the centre cooks. Reckon on 25–35 minutes for a 1½-pint dish, until risen and just firm at the middle.
- Two ounces of "good cheese"A firm well-flavoured cheese is meant — farmhouse Cheddar, Cheshire, or Parmesan for the topping. Dicing rather than grating leaves pockets of melted cheese through the souffle, which may be why the recipe specifies dice.
- The macaroniVictorian macaroni was typically long hollow pipe, and period instructions tend to call for longer boiling than we would use today. The recipe's 1½ oz is a cooked weight; use small tubes cut short and cook them fully soft, since al dente pasta gives a distracting chew against the set egg.
- SeasoningMustard here means English mustard powder, a quarter teaspoon or so, and the cayenne should be a pinch. Both are there to push the cheese forward; the tomato needs salt more generously than you might expect.
- The dishButter and dredge with brown breadcrumbs as directed — it gives a crust that helps the mixture climb, and there is no need for a collar with a base this stiff. A straight-sided 1½-pint dish is about right.
- Yield and servingEnough for three as a light supper dish or four as a savoury course. It must go to the table straight from the oven; the grated cheese goes on at the last moment so it barely melts.
This shows the late-Victorian understanding of a souffle as a technique to be applied to whatever the larder held — cheese, fish, game, or, as here, tomato pulp and a handful of leftover macaroni. The costing of 1s. is characteristic of Cassell's, which gave a probable cost for almost every dish for the benefit of the household with a fixed weekly budget; a shilling was a real but not extravagant sum for a supper dish feeding three or four. Tomatoes became a more familiar English kitchen ingredient over the second half of the nineteenth century, at first largely a hothouse and market-garden crop and later cheap enough to appear routinely in general cookery books like this one. The pairing with cheese and mustard belongs to the British "savoury" tradition — a hot, sharply seasoned dish served late in the meal — rather than to anything Italian, despite the macaroni.