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Omelet Souffle
Yolks of 7 eggs Whites of 8 eggs ¼ pound sugar 2 dessertspoons Five Roses flour Vanilla extract Pinch of salt Beat the yolks with the flour rubbed smooth in a spoonful of milk. Add sugar, vanilla and pinch of salt. Beat all well together and stir in lightly egg whites whisked very stiff. Put souffle in centre of a dish and bake in moderate oven 15 minutes. When done, sift over with sugar and serve quickly.
YOUR hands are the first that touch Five Roses flour. From the sun-flooded prairie lands of Western Canada, through the eighty elevators of the Lake of the Woods, cleaned, scoured, ground gradually by modern process, bolted many times through silk, packed automatically into absolutely new full-weight bags and barrels-Five Roses comes to particular housewives immaculate, untouched by human hands. Where else can you get so pure a flour?
This is a soufflé omelette in the French dessert sense — an egg foam baked briefly and eaten at once, not the tall straight-sided soufflé baked in a dish. Everything depends on getting it to the table before it falls.
- Weights and spoonsA quarter pound of sugar is about ½ cup plus 1 tablespoon granulated (115 g). A dessertspoon is 2 teaspoons, so the flour amount is about 4 teaspoons — barely enough to stabilise the yolks, which is the point.
- "A spoonful of milk"Read this as a tablespoon or so, just enough to work the flour into a smooth slurry with no lumps. Any more and the yolk base becomes loose and the foam deflates when you fold.
- Moderate ovenTake this as roughly 350-375°F. The recipe's 15 minutes should suit a mound of this size and leave the centre soft, which is how the dish is usually eaten; longer baking dries it out.
- The extra whiteThe recipe calls for eight whites to seven yolks; whether intentional or not, the spare white adds lift without extra fat. Whisk to stiff but still glossy peaks — overbeaten whites go grainy and will not fold in without breaking.
- "In centre of a dish"Use a buttered, sugared shallow ovenproof platter or gratin dish and heap the mixture into an oval mound in the middle. It expands outward and upward, so leave a clear inch or two of dish all round.
- FoldingSlacken the yolk base with a spoonful of the whites first, then fold the rest in two or three additions with a large spatula and stop while streaks are still faintly visible. Every extra stroke costs height.
- Serve quickly means quicklyThis collapses within a few minutes of leaving the oven. Have the plates, the sifted sugar and the eaters ready before it goes in.
- YieldServes four to six as a dessert. A pudding sauce, a fruit compote or a spoonful of jam warmed and slipped inside before serving suits it — which is presumably why the book files it here.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal in the early twentieth century and assembled largely from recipes sent in by Canadian housewives who used the flour; the milling advertisement running straight on from the instructions, with no break, is typical of the genre. The dish itself is the French omelette soufflée, a sweet egg foam browned in the oven and rushed to the table, which appears in English and North American cookbooks through the nineteenth century as a showy dessert — eggs, sugar and a spoonful of flour, no cream and no long baking. Its presence in a flour company's collection is doubly appropriate, since the small quantity of flour is what keeps the yolk base from breaking, and a book selling flour was glad of any recipe that could name it.