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Iced Strawberry Souffle
Cover two tablespoons of gelatine with cold water and let soak half an hour; set over the teakettle and stir until dissolved. Mix a pound of sugar and a pint of strawberry juice in a saucepan over the fire until they form a syrup.
Beat the yolks of six eggs until creamy.
Whip a quart of cream. Mix the syrup with the yolks of the eggs in a tin pan and set on ice; strain the gelatine into it and stir carefully until it begins to thicken, then mix the whipped cream in lightly, turn into an ice cream mold, pack in salt and ice and freeze for two hours.
This is a frozen bombe mixture in the French style, and its structure depends on six raw egg yolks that never reach a temperature that would make them safe. The notes below explain the failure and translate the period language.
- The yolks are never cookedThe syrup of sugar and strawberry juice is mixed with the beaten yolks in a tin pan that is immediately set on ice. Nothing here holds the eggs at a pasteurizing temperature for any length of time; the base is a raw custard from start to finish.
- Freezing is not a kill stepTwo hours packed in salt and ice chills the mixture hard but does nothing to Salmonella. Freezing suspends bacterial growth and preserves whatever was in the eggs, which is why frozen uncooked desserts have been repeatedly implicated in outbreaks. If you want an iced strawberry soufflé, work from a current recipe with a cooked or pasteurized base.
- Why the old method seemed to workA properly made pâte à bombe pours boiling sugar syrup in a thin stream onto whipping yolks, which can bring them near a safe temperature. This recipe gives no syrup temperature, no thermometer stage, and no continued beating over heat, so there is no way to know the base ever got there.
- "Set over the teakettle"The soaked gelatine is dissolved over the steam of a kettle, the period's improvised double boiler. Two tablespoons of granulated gelatine is roughly two envelopes' worth by volume, though old gelatine varied a good deal in strength.
- Packing in salt and iceA still-frozen mold buried in a mixture of crushed ice and rock salt, usually about three parts ice to one of salt, which drops the brine well below freezing. Nothing is churned; the whipped cream and gelatine are what keep the texture light.
- ProportionsA pound of sugar to a pint of juice is about two cups of sugar to two cups of juice, a very sweet syrup by modern taste. With a quart of cream folded in, the finished mold would have been a large one.
The iced soufflé, or soufflé glacé, was a nineteenth-century restaurant conceit: not a soufflé at all, but a frozen gelatine-and-cream bombe set in a mold, sometimes in a paper collar so it appeared to have risen above the dish like the baked article. American household magazines took up such dishes as an elegant, unchurned alternative to hand-cranked ice cream, since they needed only a mold, a barrel of ice and coarse salt, and a few hours of standing. The reliance on uncooked yolks attracted no comment at the time, before the connection between shell eggs and salmonellosis had been made.