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Spanish Souffle
1/4 cup butter 1/2 cup stale bread crumbs 1 cup milk 2 tablespoons sugar 3 eggs 1/2 teaspoon vanilla Melt butter, add crumbs, cook until slightly browned, stirring often; add milk and sugar, cook twenty minutes in double boiler; remove from fire, add unbeaten yolks of eggs, then cut and fold in whites of eggs beaten until stiff, and flavor. Bake same as Fruit Souffle.
A bread-crumb souffle, essentially a thick panada lightened with beaten whites. It is far more forgiving than a flour-and-cheese souffle, but the folding step still decides whether it rises.
- The hinge: fold, do not stirThe crumb base must be cooled to warm before the yolks go in, and the stiff whites should be cut and folded through in three additions with a spatula. Stirring collapses the foam and you get a dense pudding instead of a souffle.
- Stale bread crumbsThis means soft crumbs torn or grated from day-old bread with the crust off, not dry packaged crumbs. Dried commercial crumbs absorb far more milk and will give a pasty base; if that is all you have, use a scant 1/3 cup.
- Double boiler, twenty minutesThe long gentle cooking is there to swell the crumbs into a smooth paste. Twenty minutes is not excessive with soft crumbs; stir now and then and expect a mixture about the thickness of a thin porridge.
- OvenThe recipe defers to the book's Fruit Souffle, whose directions are not repeated here; check that page before baking. A moderate oven, around 350F, suits a crumb souffle of this size in a buttered 1-quart dish, 30 to 40 minutes, until well puffed and just set at the centre.
- EggsEggs of the period may have run somewhat smaller than today's large eggs. If the souffle comes out slightly wet at the middle, try medium eggs next time.
- Serve at onceTake it to the table straight from the oven with a thin custard, hard sauce or fruit sauce. It falls within a few minutes, which is why hot puddings of this kind were timed to the end of the meal.
- YieldFour small servings, or three generous ones.
This belongs to a large family of American "souffle puddings" that stretch a few eggs with a starch base -- bread, cracker crumbs, rice or cornstarch -- rather than the flourless egg-and-fruit souffles of French pastry work. The name Spanish is doing the same vague duty here as in Spanish cream and Spanish buns, where it carries no consistent meaning; what it was meant to signal in this recipe is not recorded. Domestic-science books of this period were fond of the double boiler, which let a cook hold a milk-and-crumb base below scorching heat on a coal or early gas range, and the whole recipe is built around economy: a quarter cup of butter, a half cup of crumbs and three eggs producing a dish grand enough to close a dinner.