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Cheese Souffle
2 tablespoons butter 3 tablespoons flour 1/2 cup scalded milk 1/2 teaspoon salt Few grains cayenne 1/4 cup grated Old English or Young America cheese Yolks 3 eggs Whites 3 eggs Melt butter, add flour, and when well-mixed add gradually scalded milk. Then add salt, cayenne, and cheese. Remove from fire; add yolks of eggs beaten until lemon-colored. Cool mixture, and cut and fold in whites of eggs beaten until stiff and dry. Pour into a buttered-baking dish, and bake twenty minutes in a slow oven. Serve at once.
A small, very stiff-based souffle of the Boston cooking-school type, sized for two or three people. The hinge is the fold: the base must be cool enough not to slacken the whites, and the whites must go in with a cutting-and-folding motion rather than a stir.
- Oven temperatureA slow oven in this period is usually taken to mean somewhere around 275-325F. At that heat twenty minutes will only just set a small souffle; modern recipes for this style more often call for 350-375F for 20-25 minutes, until risen and set with a slight tremble at the centre.
- The two cheesesOld English and Young America were both grades of American commercial cheese sold around this period -- the first a sharp, well-aged cheddar type, the second a small, mild young cheddar. A sharp cheddar, or a mix of sharp and mild, gives the intended flavour.
- Quarter cup of cheeseThat is roughly 1 oz grated, which by modern taste is restrained. Doubling it to 2 oz will not upset the structure, since the base here is unusually thick.
- A very thick baseThree tablespoons flour to half a cup of milk gives a paste, not a sauce. This is deliberate: it carries the whites. Cook the butter and flour a minute before the milk goes in, and beat hard as it thickens.
- Scalding the milkScalding was a precaution from the days of unpasteurised milk and also helped the roux take it smoothly. With modern milk, warming it is enough; cold milk works if added in stages.
- Cooling before the yolksTake the pan off the heat as directed, then let it lose its fierce heat before the yolks go in, or they will scramble in streaks. Cool further -- to barely warm -- before the whites.
- Whites beaten stiff and dryPeriod phrasing for fully beaten whites. Stop at firm, glossy peaks; genuinely dry, chalky whites break into lumps and refuse to fold in.
- Dish and yieldUse a small buttered souffle dish (about a quart) or four small ramekins. It serves two as a light main course, three as an entree in the older sense of a small course before the roast.
- Serve at onceNo exaggeration -- a souffle this small begins to fall within two or three minutes of leaving the oven. Have the plates and the table ready before it goes in.
Cheese souffle was a staple of the American cookery-school books, combining white sauce and beaten egg whites in a single dish; the French verb souffler, to blow or puff, describes both the method and the fragility of the result. The listing of Old English and Young America by name places this recipe in the era before packaged process cheese displaced such grades from grocers' cases.