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Cocoanut Souffle
1 cup of milk, 1 pinch of salt 3 level tablespoonfuls of flour, softened in a little cold milk, 4 level tablespoonfuls of sugar, Yolks of four eggs, 1 teaspoonful of vanilla, 1 cup of shredded cocoanut, 2 level tablespoonfuls of butter, Whites of four eggs.
Heat milk, add salt and flour and cook ten minutes after it has thickened. Mix together, butter, sugar and yolks of eggs. Pour hot mixture over, stirring well and set aside to cool. Add vanilla and cocoanut. Lastly fold in the stiffly beaten whites of the eggs. Bake in buttered pan, in moderate oven until firm. Serve hot with Chocolate Sauce.
A standard flour-thickened soufflé base, enriched with yolks and coconut. The original assumes you know how a soufflé behaves; the notes below fill in what it leaves unsaid.
- The hinge: fold, then bake at onceThe beaten whites are the only leavening. Fold them in with a spatula in three additions until barely combined, streaks and all, and get the dish into a hot oven immediately. A batter left standing on the counter deflates and bakes dense.
- "Moderate oven"Around 350F. Reckon on 30 to 40 minutes. The recipe says to bake until firm, so look for a browned, set top rather than a loose centre.
- The base is a thick panadeThe base is thick -- One cup of milk with three level tablespoons of flour makes a thick white sauce, well past pouring consistency. Stir constantly over low heat; the ten minutes of cooking after it thickens serves to cook out the raw flour taste, and is not excessive.
- Tempering"Pour hot mixture over" means over the butter, sugar and yolks, in a slow stream while whisking. Reversed, or dumped in at once, the yolks scramble.
- CocoanutRead this as unsweetened desiccated or freshly grated coconut, the common form in period recipes of this kind. Modern sweetened flaked coconut will make the souffle cloying against the four tablespoons of sugar already in the base; reduce the sugar or buy unsweetened.
- "Buttered pan"Nothing further is specified; a straight-sided dish of about 1.5 quarts suits this quantity. Butter it generously, and dusting with sugar helps the batter climb the walls; a shallow pan gives a wide flat souffle rather than a risen one.
- Yield and servingProbably four servings, six at a stretch. It begins sinking within a minute or two of leaving the oven, so bring it to the table straight away with the chocolate sauce poured at each plate rather than over the whole dish.
This comes from one of the small recipe booklets issued by Walter Baker & Co. of Dorchester, Massachusetts, a chocolate firm dating to the eighteenth century that spent the late 1800s and early 1900s distributing free or cheap cookery pamphlets to keep its cocoa and baking chocolate in American kitchens. That commercial purpose is worth keeping in mind when a coconut soufflé appears at all in a chocolate book: the dish itself contains no chocolate, and it is printed alongside a Chocolate Sauce recipe. The soufflé technique here is a flour-and-milk panade enriched with yolks and lightened with whipped whites. Coconut reached ordinary households in quantity once desiccated shredded coconut was being packed and sold commercially in the later nineteenth century, and it turns up constantly in period cakes, pies and puddings as a mark of something a little festive.