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Chocolate Souffle
2 tablespoons butter, 3 tablespoons flour, 1 cup milk, 1/3 cup sugar, 2 tablespoons boiling water, 4 eggs, 2 ounces Walter Baker & Co.'s Premium No. 1 Chocolate.
Melt butter, add flour and stir until well blended, then pour on gradually the milk and bring to the boiling point. Melt chocolate in small saucepan, placed in larger saucepan of boiling water; add sugar and water and stir until smooth. Combine mixtures and add yolks of eggs beaten until thick and lemon-colored. Cool and fold in whites of eggs beaten until stiff. Turn into a buttered pudding-dish, and bake in a moderate oven from thirty to thirty-five minutes. Serve at once with vanilla cream sauce.
CHOCOLATE BLANC=MANGE 1 quart milk, 1 tablespoon Sea Moss Farina, 2 ounces Walter Baker & Co.'s Premium No. 1 Chocolate, 1/4 cup sugar, 2 tablespoons boiling water, 1 teaspoon vanilla, 1/4 teaspoon salt.
Put milk in double-boiler, place on range, and while milk is still cold sprinkle in farina, stirring constantly. Cover and cook twenty minutes, stirring frequently. Melt chocolate over hot water, add sugar and boiling water. When smooth add to milk with vanilla and salt. Strain into a mould first dipped in cold water. Set mould in cold place, not moving until blanc-manage is cold and firm. Serve with sugar and cream. If moulded for individual service, use an additional one-half cup milk.
Two desserts run together on one page: a baked chocolate souffle built on a thick bechamel-style base, and a chocolate blanc-mange set with a seaweed product. Both are workable today with a few substitutions.
- Premium No. 1 ChocolateWalter Baker's Premium No. 1 was plain unsweetened chocolate, roughly 50 percent cocoa butter and nothing added. Use 2 oz of unsweetened baking chocolate; do not substitute semisweet or the sugar quantities collapse.
- Moderate ovenGenerally taken as about 350-375F. The souffle wants steady heat from the bottom, so bake on a low rack and resist opening the door before the 30-minute mark.
- Cool before the whites"Cool and fold in whites" is the hinge of the recipe. Folding stiff whites into a hot base deflates them immediately; the base should be barely warm to the touch.
- Pudding-dishA straight-sided baking dish of about 1 1/2 quarts, buttered. Expect a rise of an inch or two and a soft, pudding-like interior rather than a tall restaurant souffle.
- Vanilla cream sauceMost likely a thin pouring custard along the lines of creme anglaise: milk or cream, egg yolks, sugar, vanilla, cooked until it coats a spoon. Any modern version serves.
- Sea Moss FarinaA branded preparation of dried Irish moss (carrageen), sold as a setting agent. It is no longer on shelves. Whole dried Irish moss, soaked and simmered in the milk then strained, does the same work; 1 tablespoon of the old farina is a light set, and cornstarch is not an equivalent swap at that quantity.
- UnmouldingRinsing the mould in cold water helps the blanc-mange release. Chill it several hours until fully firm, then dip the mould briefly in warm water and invert.
- YieldThe souffle serves four to six and must go to the table straight from the oven. The blanc-mange makes about a quart; the recipe adds a half-cup of milk when moulded for individual service.
Walter Baker & Co. of Dorchester, Massachusetts was the oldest chocolate concern in the United States, and its Choice Recipes pamphlets were promotional booklets given away or sold cheaply to put its bars into home kitchens; many editions carried recipes credited to Boston domestic-science and cooking-school writers, which is why the technique here reads like turn-of-the-century domestic-science instruction. Blanc-mange had by this date drifted a long way from its medieval namesake, a white dish of pounded almonds and capon; by 1900 it meant simply a moulded milk pudding, and American versions were set with cornstarch, arrowroot, gelatine, or as here with Irish moss, a red seaweed gathered off the New England and Irish coasts whose carrageenan gels milk. Chocolate blanc-mange, being neither white nor almond, shows how completely the word had come to mean nothing more than the mould it was turned out of.