Veal Souffles
2 cups chopped cooked meat 2 tablespoons Gold Medal flour 3 beaten eggs, 2 cups milk 1 teaspoon chopped parsley 1/2 teaspoon salt Few grains cayenne Melt the butter, add the flour and seasonings, stirring until smooth; pour in the milk, a little at a time, and cook until it thickens. Add the meat. When it is heated through fold in the beaten eggs, pour in a buttered dish and bake twenty minutes.
A thrifty leftover dish built on a thick white sauce. The ingredient list in the original is incomplete and the oven temperature is left to the cook, so a little filling-in is needed.
- The missing butterThe method begins "melt the butter" but no butter appears in the list. Use 2 tablespoons, matched to the 2 tablespoons of flour, which is the standard proportion for a sauce of this thickness.
- Oven temperatureUnstated, as often in books of this date. A moderate oven, around 350F, for the twenty minutes given; the mixture is already hot when it goes in, so it only needs to set and puff.
- Beaten eggsFor a true souffle rise, separate the eggs: beat the yolks into the warm sauce, then fold in the whites whipped to soft peaks. Whole beaten eggs, as written, give a firm savoury custard rather than a souffle.
- Cool the sauce slightlyThe hinge of the dish. Let the meat sauce drop below scalding before the eggs go in, or they scramble in streaks and the mixture will not lift in the oven.
- The meatAny cooked veal will do, but it must be finely chopped or briefly pulsed in a processor. Coarse pieces sink and tear the set custard as it rises.
- Dish sizeThe 2 cups of meat and 2 cups of milk fill a 1 1/2-quart buttered baking dish. Fill no more than three quarters up if you separate the eggs.
- DonenessTwenty minutes suits a shallow dish; a deeper one needs 30 to 35. It is done when the centre is set and a knife comes out clean, and it should be served straight from the oven.
- Seasoning and yieldHalf a teaspoon of salt is light for a mixture of this size, especially if the veal was unseasoned; taste the sauce before the eggs go in. Serves four as a light main course.
Gold Medal, the flour brand of the Washburn-Crosby company in Minneapolis, was promoted through giveaway cook books of this kind in the early twentieth century, and such books naturally worked branded flour into as many recipes as possible, including ones like this where two tablespoons of it thicken a white sauce. The dish itself is a domesticated souffle: by the late nineteenth century American cookery writers had reduced the French souffle to a formula of butter-flour-milk plus eggs plus whatever cooked meat, fish or cheese the household had left over, and the same base appears in period books as chicken souffle, salmon souffle and cheese souffle with only the filling changed. Veal, mild and often roasted in a large joint that needed using up, was an obvious candidate. Building a second meal from Sunday's meat under a French name is a recurring theme in the leftover chapters of books of this era.