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Cocoanut Souffle
1 cup milk Pinch of salt 3 tablespoons Five Roses flour 2 tablespoons butter 4 eggs 4 tablespoons sugar 1 teaspoon vanilla 1 cup shredded cocoanut
The Five Roses book gives the ingredients and assumes the cook knows what to do with them, as was common for a soufflé in 1913. The proportions themselves are sound and translate directly to a modern kitchen.
- The missing methodThis is a standard flour-thickened soufflé: melt the butter, stir in the flour, cook briefly, whisk in the milk and salt to make a thick paste, then beat in the sugar, the four egg yolks, the vanilla and the coconut off the heat. The four whites are whipped to soft peaks and folded in last, in two or three additions.
- The hingeFold the whites in with a light hand and bake immediately. A soufflé batter left standing while the oven comes up will deflate before it ever sets, so have the oven hot and the dish buttered before the whites are beaten.
- OvenThe book gives no temperature; a soufflé of this size wants a moderate oven, 350-375F, for roughly 30 to 35 minutes in a buttered 1.5-quart dish. It is done when well risen, browned, and only slightly loose at the centre.
- CocoanutThe older spelling is just coconut. Shredded coconut of the period was sold both moist-and-sweetened and dried; unsweetened desiccated coconut is drier and will absorb more of the base, so that version bakes up a little firmer and less sweet.
- FlourFive Roses was milled from hard Canadian spring wheat. Plain all-purpose flour is the closer match here, and three tablespoons to a cup of milk gives the very thick panada a souffle needs to hold the whites.
- Yield and servingServes four to six, and must go to the table straight from the oven.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and given away or sold cheaply to Canadian households buying its flour, which explains why the brand name appears inside the ingredient list itself. The soufflé — from the French souffler, to blow or puff — had by this date come down from restaurant cookery into the domestic repertoire, and the flour-and-milk base used here is the sturdy home version, more forgiving than a pastry cook's. Coconut in a prairie-flour cookbook is a mark of how far the grocery trade had come: desiccated and shredded coconut, shipped in packets from tropical processors, was cheap and shelf-stable by the 1890s and turns up constantly in North American cakes, pies and puddings of the period.