Home › Hot Puddings › Chocolate Souffle
Chocolate Souffle
2 tablespoons butter 2 tablespoons flour 3/4 cup milk 1 1/2 squares unsweetened chocolate 1/3 cup sugar 2 tablespoons hot water 3 eggs 1/2 teaspoon vanilla Melt the butter, add flour, and pour on gradually, while stirring constantly, milk; cook until boiling-point is reached. Melt chocolate in a small saucepan placed over hot water, add sugar and water, and stir until smooth. Combine mixtures, and add yolks of eggs well beaten; cool. Fold in whites of eggs beaten stiff, and add vanilla. Turn into a buttered baking-dish, and bake in a moderate oven twenty-five minutes. Serve with Cream Sauce I.
A roux-based soufflé of the sort standard in American cookery schools around 1900 — sturdier and more pudding-like than a modern restaurant soufflé, and far more forgiving.
- The hingeCool the chocolate-and-yolk base until it is barely warm before the whites go in. Folded into a hot base the whites deflate at once and the soufflé bakes into a dense chocolate pudding.
- Squares of chocolateA square meant a 1-ounce block of unsweetened baking chocolate, so 1 1/2 squares is 1 1/2 oz. Modern bars are often scored into 1/2-oz pieces — weigh rather than count.
- Moderate ovenAbout 350F. Twenty-five minutes gives a soufflé set at the edges and slightly loose at the centre.
- Baking dishA buttered dish of roughly a quart suits these quantities, buttered right up the sides so the mixture can climb. There is no call for a collar or a water bath here; the flour in the base holds it together.
- FoldingBeat the whites to firm but not dry peaks. Stir a spoonful into the base to loosen it, then fold the rest in two additions with a spatula, stopping while a few streaks remain.
- Vanilla lastThe vanilla goes in after the whites, as written. Fold it in with the final few strokes.
- Yield and servingServes four modestly. Carry it straight from the oven to the table; it will begin to sink within a few minutes, which is normal for this style.
- Cream Sauce IA cross-reference to a sauce recipe printed elsewhere in the book, not given here. A pouring custard or lightly sweetened cold cream serves the same purpose.
This is the American cooking-school soufflé: a thick white sauce enriched with yolks, lightened with beaten whites, and baked in a plain dish rather than a mould. Cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s built numerous dessert soufflés on exactly this pattern. Unsweetened baking chocolate melted over hot water with its own sugar and water was a common way to introduce chocolate to a dessert in this period. The instruction to serve with a separate cream sauce reflects the period's habit of listing sauces as numbered recipes elsewhere in the book, to be cross-referenced rather than repeated.