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Cheese Souffle
Two even tablespoons butter, three even tablespoons of flour, one-half cup of milk, one-half teaspoon salt, a little cayenne, three eggs, one cup grated cheese. Make a white sauce of the butter, flour, milk, salt and cayenne, add the cheese; stir until melted. Pour this on the beaten yolks, beating all the time; when cool fold in the beaten whites, bake in a buttered dish twenty to thirty minutes. Do not look at or move the souffle for fifteen minutes. Serve immediately.
— Mrs. Stanley Vincent
A compact, old-style soufflé built on a very stiff panade rather than a pourable white sauce. The proportions work, but the book leaves out the oven temperature and the dish size.
- Oven temperatureNone is given, which was normal when cooks judged by hand and by the fire. Bake at 375F for a browned, slightly loose center, or 350F if you want it to hold longer before it falls.
- The sauce is meant to be stiffThree tablespoons of flour to half a cup of milk gives a paste, not a sauce. That is correct here: the thick base supports the cheese and the whites. Do not thin it.
- Cool the base before the whitesThe hinge of the recipe. Egg white folded into a hot base deflates and sets in streaks. The base should be barely warm to the touch, and the whites beaten only to soft, glossy peaks that still slump slightly.
- "Grated cheese"In an American community cookbook of this period this most likely means a firm store or "American" cheese, in practice a plain cheddar. A cup, loosely packed, is about 3 to 4 oz. Skip pre-shredded cheese, whose anti-caking starch can make the base grainy.
- Melt off the heatAdd the cheese to the finished sauce with the pan off the burner and stir until it disappears. Held over direct heat, cheddar breaks and weeps fat, and the soufflé bakes greasy.
- Dish sizeUse a buttered 1-quart straight-sided dish for a proper rise, or four 6 oz ramekins, which need only 15 to 18 minutes. Butter the sides with upward strokes so the batter can climb.
- "Do not look at or move"Sound advice with a wood range and worth keeping: opening the door in the first 15 minutes drops the oven temperature and collapses the structure before the egg has set. Judge doneness through the glass at 20 minutes.
- YieldServes three as a light supper dish with bread and a salad, or four as a first course. It will begin to sink within a few minutes of leaving the oven, which is why the receipt ends where it does.
Cheese soufflé was already known in American cookbooks before the French-influenced cooking-school movement of the 1890s, but that movement did much to spread it — Fannie Farmer and Maria Parloa both taught the butter-flour-milk base as a foundation lesson, and from there it passed into church and village compilations like this one, credited to whichever local woman was known for it. The dish is often said to belong to a specific domestic moment, when ranges could be relied on to hold an even oven for half an hour, and eggs and milk were cheap, so a hostess could produce something that looked ambitious from a cup of grated cheese and three eggs. The word itself is simply the French past participle of souffler, to blow or puff. The stern instruction not to look at it is the tell that this was written by someone who had learned the hard way, and it is the one line in the receipt no modern cook should ignore.