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Cheese Souffle
1/4 lb. cheese grated 1 cup scalded milk 2 tablespoons butter 3 tablespoons Gold Medal flour 4 eggs, 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/8 teaspoon pepper Beat the eggs, yolks and whites separately. Make a white sauce, add the grated cheese, let it cool, then fold in the stiffly beaten whites and bake at once in paper cases or in buttered baking dish. Bake from ten to fifteen minutes. Serve immediately when taken from oven.
A plain béchamel-based soufflé from a flour-milling promotional book, written for cooks who already knew the method. Two things are left unsaid: when the yolks go in, and how hot the oven should be.
- The yolksThe recipe separates four eggs but never tells you where the yolks go. Beat them into the cheese sauce after it has cooled slightly, off the heat, before folding in the whites. If the sauce is hot enough to scramble them, the texture is lost.
- Oven temperatureNo number is given, and the book offers no oven description to work from. A moderate oven, in modern terms somewhere around 375F, suits a soufflé of this size; too cool and it will not climb, too hot and the outside sets before the centre rises.
- Timing depends on the vesselThe recipe gives ten to fifteen minutes for either option, which suits small paper cases better than a single dish. A whole mixture baked in one buttered dish will likely need considerably longer, until the top is browned and the centre barely wobbles.
- Bake at onceThis is the hinge. The whites begin losing air the moment they are folded in, so the oven must be up to temperature and the dish buttered before you start beating. Nothing about a soufflé tolerates a pause.
- The cheeseA quarter pound is about 1 cup grated. The recipe does not specify a variety; a sharp cheddar or aged Gruyere gives the flavour the quantity implies. Pre-shredded cheese carries anti-caking starch and thickens the sauce unpleasantly.
- Scalded milkHeating milk to just below boiling was routine in books of this period, partly to speed the sauce. With modern milk it is optional, though warm milk still blends into the roux with less lumping.
- Paper casesThese were stiff pleated paper moulds, used for individual portions. Buttered ramekins of 6 to 8 oz do the same job; fill them to about three-quarters.
- YieldServes four as an entrée in the older sense of a course between fish and roast, or three as a light main dish with a salad.
Souffles came into English-language cookbooks through nineteenth-century French cooking, and the cheese version, built from nothing but white sauce, cheese and eggs, depended entirely on timing for its success. Gold Medal cookbooks were issued by the Washburn-Crosby milling company of Minneapolis, and existed to demonstrate that their flour performed in every branch of cookery; a souffle's three tablespoons of flour thickening a cup of milk was a quiet argument for the product. The instruction to bake in "paper cases" reflects a period when pleated paper moulds were a common way to serve individual portions.