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Custard Souffle
3 tablespoons butter 1/4 cup flour 1/4 cup sugar 1 cup scalded milk 4 eggs 1/2 teaspoon salt Melt butter, add flour, and gradually hot milk. Bring to boiling-point and pour on to yolks of eggs beaten until thick and lemon-colored, and mixed with sugar and salt; cool, and cut and fold in whites of eggs beaten stiff and dry. Turn into buttered pudding-dish, and bake from thirty to thirty-five minutes in slow oven; take from oven and serve at once,-if not served immediately it is sure to fall; serve with Creamy or Foamy Sauce.
A classic panada-based souffle: a thick butter-flour-milk paste enriched with yolks and lightened with beaten whites. The proportions are sound and need no adjustment; only a few of the directions want translating.
- Slow ovenBake at 300-325F. A souffle built on a flour base tolerates the lower end well, and thirty to thirty-five minutes at that heat gives a set edge with a soft centre.
- The hingeTemper carefully. The hot milk-and-flour mixture is poured onto the yolks, not the reverse, and the base must be cooled before the whites go in or they will deflate on contact.
- "Cut and fold"An older phrase for folding: the spoon or spatula cuts down through the middle, sweeps along the bottom and lifts over. Stop while a few streaks of white still show.
- "Stiff and dry"Period language for whites beaten to firm peaks. Taken literally to the point of a dry, grainy, separating foam, they lose their lifting power; stop at firm and still glossy.
- Pudding-dishUse a 1 1/2-quart straight-sided baking dish or souffle mould, buttered well. A wide shallow dish bakes faster and rises less.
- Serve at onceThe warning is real. A souffle begins collapsing within a minute or two out of the oven, so have plates, sauce and diners ready before it comes out.
- YieldFour servings, five at a stretch. The author names two accompaniments, Creamy Sauce and Foamy Sauce, given elsewhere in the book.
Souffles reached American cookbooks through French professional practice, and by the late nineteenth century the flour-thickened version was widely taught in household cookery, in part because it is more forgiving than a souffle bound with yolks alone. Cooking-school writers of the period taught it as a lesson in method: make a thick white sauce, enrich it, lighten it, bake it.