Home › Poultry › Chicken Souffle
Chicken Souffle
2 cups of cold chicken chopped fine 2 cups of scalded milk 2 tablespoons butter 2 tablespoons Gold Medal flour 1 teaspoon chopped parsley 1/2 cup bread crumbs 1 teaspoon salt Few grains cayenne 4 eggs Melt butter, add flour and seasonings, cook; add gradually the milk, cooking to a smooth cream, add to this the parsley, bread crumbs and the chicken. Combine with beaten yolks; lastly fold in the whites beaten stiff. Turn into a buttered baking dish, bake in a slow oven thirty-five minutes.
A cooked-chicken soufflé built on a thick white sauce — closer to what a modern cook would call a chicken pudding than to a soaring cheese soufflé. The ratios are sound; only the oven language and a few assumptions need translating.
- Slow ovenRead this as 300–325°F. The low heat is deliberate: a soufflé bound with this much sauce and meat sets gently and cracks or weeps if pushed hot.
- The hinge is the sauceTwo tablespoons each of butter and flour to two cups of milk gives a thin béchamel. Cook the roux a full minute before adding milk, and add the milk gradually off a hard boil, or the finished dish will taste of raw flour.
- Cool before the yolksThe recipe does not say so, but let the sauce-and-chicken mixture drop to warm before beating in the yolks, or they will scramble in streaks.
- Scalded milkUsually explained as a holdover from unpasteurised dairy, when heating the milk checked souring organisms and was thought to improve texture. With modern milk it simply speeds the sauce; heating it to steaming is enough.
- Bread crumbsRecipes of this type generally meant soft fresh crumbs from a day-old loaf rather than the dry sandy kind sold in canisters. Dry crumbs will absorb far more of the sauce and give a stodgy result; if that is all you have, use a scant 1/3 cup.
- Baking dishA buttered 1 1/2- to 2-quart dish, filled no more than three-quarters. A straight-sided dish rises better than a shallow gratin, though this mixture is heavy enough that it will not climb dramatically.
- DonenessThirty-five minutes suits a 1 1/2-quart dish; a deeper one may want 45–50. It is done when the centre is just set and a knife comes out clean — a wobbly middle here means underbaked egg, not a fashionable runny soufflé.
- YieldServes four as a main course, six as a light supper dish. Serve straight from the oven; it will sink within a few minutes and never recovers.
Soufflés of this kind were a standard American answer to leftover roast fowl for much of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and cookbooks of the period print near-identical versions under chicken, veal, salmon and lobster — the meat changes, the béchamel-and-eggs scaffolding does not. The bread crumbs are often read as the mark of a domestic rather than a restaurant soufflé: they add body and insurance against collapse, at the cost of the lightness a French chef would insist on. Gold Medal's cookbooks, issued by the Washburn-Crosby milling company as promotional literature, were written to put branded flour into every part of the meal. Beyond salt, the cayenne and parsley are the seasoning, typical of a period when a well-made cream sauce was considered flavour enough.