Ben Wilson
CORN AND CHEESE SOUFFLÉ 1 tablespoon butter 1 tablespoon chopped green pepper 1/4 cup flour 2 cups milk 1 cup chopped corn 1 cup grated cheese 3 eggs ½ teaspoon salt Melt the butter and cook the pepper thoroughly in it. Make a sauce out of the flour, milk and cheese; add the corn, egg yolks and seasoning; cut and fold in the whites beaten stiffly; turn into a buttered baking dish and bake over a medium flame thirty minutes.
With best regards,
A cheese-and-corn panade thickened with a roux, lightened with beaten whites — closer to a sturdy spoonbread than a true French soufflé, which is a good thing here, since it will not collapse the moment it leaves the oven.
- "Bake over a medium flame"Probably a gas oven at moderate heat; a modern cook would read this as somewhere near 350F, though the recipe gives no temperature. The sauce is made on the range first, after which the dish goes into the oven for the full thirty minutes.
- Fat and flour are out of balanceOne tablespoon of butter cannot carry 1/4 cup of flour. Use 3 to 4 tablespoons so the roux comes together, or the sauce will taste pasty.
- "Chopped corn"Most likely fresh kernels cut from the cob and roughly chopped; a cup is about one and a half to two ears. Drained canned or thawed frozen kernels work; avoid cream-style, which will thin the base.
- The cheese"grated cheese" in an American household of the period would most often have meant a firm aged Cheddar or a dry store cheese. Add it off the heat, once the white sauce has thickened, so it melts without breaking.
- Salt1½ teaspoons is generous alongside a cup of cheese. Season the sauce to taste before the yolks go in.
- FoldingCool the cheese sauce until it is warm rather than hot before stirring in the yolks, then fold the stiff whites in two additions. Stop while streaks are still faintly visible.
- Dish and donenessA buttered baking dish of about two quarts, filled no more than three-quarters. In a moderate oven it is done when the top is browned and the centre no longer trembles as a liquid -- 30 to 40 minutes depending on the depth of the dish.
- YieldFour as a light supper dish, six as a side. Serve directly from the dish, immediately.
- The closing line"With best regards," is the sign-off of the letter the recipe arrived in, printed as received.
This comes from a collection of recipes solicited by letter from stage and screen performers, which is why the text ends mid-correspondence with a valediction and no signature. Ben Wilson was a working American silent-film actor and director of the period, and what he sent was something a household cook could actually put on a table rather than anything theatrical. The dish itself sits at a junction: the cheese soufflé was a French import that American cookbooks had thoroughly domesticated by the 1910s, while scalloped corn belonged to the older native repertoire of dishes built on fresh kernels cut from the cob. Binding them with a flour-and-milk sauce is characteristic of the era's cooking-school teaching, which treated the white sauce as the universal foundation and taught cooks to vary it endlessly.