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Little Soufflés
Stir juice of two lemons or other tart fruit into the mashed pulp of six bananas and rub through sieve. Add one pint whipped cream, or whipped white of egg and cream mixed, and bake briskly, serving at once, or freeze as ice cream. Raspberry or other flavouring may be added if liked.
A one-paragraph recipe of the kind common in Edwardian fruit cookery: it assumes you know what a soufflé mixture should look like and leaves out sugar, dish size and time entirely. Read it as a ratio rather than a set of instructions.
- The hinge: serve the second it leaves the ovenThere is no flour, no custard base and no yolk here, so there is little to hold the structure; the egg-white version firms only slightly. The rise is largely air beaten into the cream or white, and it sinks quickly once out of the heat. "Serving at once" is part of the technique, not a flourish.
- "Bake briskly"A brisk oven in this period is usually taken to mean somewhere around 375-425F. Small buttered ramekins will need only a short bake, on the order of 10-12 minutes; a single large dish is likely to collapse before the centre is warmed through.
- Quantities and yieldSix bananas mashed give roughly 2 to 2 1/2 cups of pulp, and a pint of cream roughly doubles in volume when whipped. That should be enough for something like six to eight small ramekins.
- No sugar is specifiedThe recipe leaves sweetening entirely to the cook. With modern fruit you may want only 2-3 tablespoons of caster sugar, or the two lemons will dominate.
- Why the lemon is not optionalMashed banana browns within minutes through enzymatic oxidation, and acid slows this. It is at least convenient that the juice goes into the pulp before sieving rather than after.
- Rubbing through a sieveThis is doing the work a blender or food processor now does in seconds. The aim is a purée with no fibrous strings, which would otherwise show as threads in the finished soufflé.
- Cream, or white and cream mixedWhipped cream alone bakes to a richer, denser result; egg white lightens it but also makes it more fragile. Fold in two or three motions with a spatula and stop while streaks are still faintly visible.
- The frozen versionFrozen rather than baked, this is essentially a banana semifreddo, and the whipped egg white is then never cooked. If you take that route, use pasteurised whites, or leave the whites out and use cream only.
Banana recipes appear thickly in English and American cookbooks from the 1890s onward, and their sudden abundance is a shipping story rather than a culinary one: refrigerated steamers and Caribbean plantation trade made the fruit cheap and ordinary in northern cities within a couple of decades, and household writers looked for uses for it beyond eating it out of hand. A book of fruit recipes of this vintage tends to treat the banana as a novelty needing sharpening, hence the insistence on lemon or "other tart fruit". The "little soufflé" itself is a French borrowing that had by then been thoroughly domesticated in English kitchens, usually as an inexpensive way to turn a purée and some whipped cream into a dish that looked like a dinner-party dessert. The casual instruction to bake it or freeze it, whichever suits, is characteristic of the period's fruit cookery: the mixture was understood as a base, and the cook decided the rest.