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Frozen Souffle Glace
4 eggs Grated rind 1 lemon 2/3 cup sugar 1 tablespoon lemon juice 1/2 cup Madeira wine Few grains salt 2/3 cup heavy cream Beat yolks of eggs slightly; add lemon juice, grated rind, wine, sugar, and salt; cook until mixture thickens, stirring constantly. Add whites of eggs beaten stiff, and when well mixed, set in a pan of ice-water to cool, stirring occasionally. Beat cream until stiff, and add. Fill small paper cases with mixture, cover with macaroon dust, and set in a tin mould with tight-fitting cover. Pack mould in salt and ice, and let stand two hours.
A late nineteenth-century frozen souffl\ter e — a still-frozen custard set in packed ice rather than churned. The technique is sound, but one step in it is not, and that governs everything else below.
- Why this one failsThe stiffly beaten egg whites go into the mixture after the yolk custard has been cooked, and nothing afterwards raises the temperature again — the dish is only chilled and frozen. Freezing does not destroy Salmonella; it merely holds it. The whites are eaten raw.
- Not a cooking-time problemThere is no adjustment to the two hours in the ice that fixes this, because the risk is in an ingredient added after the heat step, not in the freezing. If you want a frozen soufflé of this kind, work from a current recipe built around a cooked or pasteurised meringue.
- MadeiraA fortified wine, then a standard flavouring in sweet kitchen work and far commoner in American pantries than it is now. Half a cup in a dessert of this size is for flavour, not for setting or preserving — it contributes nothing to safety.
- Macaroon dustDried almond macaroons crushed to a coarse powder. It appears as a standing ingredient in cookery-school books of the period, used to coat or garnish cold and iced sweets.
- Paper cases and the mouldSmall pleated paper cases, like sturdy cupcake liners, stood upright inside a lidded tin mould. The lid mattered: brine from the packing ice must not reach the contents.
- Packing in salt and iceThe recipe gives no proportions; period books generally call for something in the range of one part rock salt to three or four parts crushed ice, repacked as it drains. This is a still-freezing method -- nothing is churned, so the whipped cream and beaten whites are the only things keeping the texture light.
- YieldFour eggs and two-thirds of a cup of cream fill about six to eight small cases.
The soufflé glacé is French in name and idea: a frozen cream lightened with meringue and set in a case, imitating a baked soufflé without ever seeing an oven. It reached American cookery-school books in the decades when ice was cheap, delivered and reliable, but mechanical refrigeration was not yet domestic — hence the salt-and-ice packing, the tight-fitting tin, and the patient two hours of standing.