Home › Frozen Desserts › Maple Souffle
Maple Souffle
Three-fourths cup of maple syrup and whites of four eggs. Beat together and cook in a double boiler until thick, stirring constantly. When cool add one pint of cream whipped. Pack in salt and ice for four hours.- Mrs Alvah W.
Palmer.
A still-frozen mousse from the era before home freezers: no churning, no stirring during freezing, just a cooked meringue folded into whipped cream and packed in an ice-and-salt bath. The whole dish stands on how far you take the egg whites in the double boiler.
- The hinge: cook the meringue properlyBeat the syrup and whites together over simmering water, off the direct heat, until the mixture holds a thick ribbon and reads 160F on an instant-read thermometer. Undercooked, it will weep and separate as it freezes; overcooked or heated too fast, the whites scramble into threads.
- Maple syrupUse real syrup, Grade A dark or amber, not pancake syrup, which is corn syrup with flavouring and will taste flat once frozen. Three-fourths cup is 6 fl oz.
- CreamA pint is 2 cups. Heavy or whipping cream, whipped to soft peaks only — stiff cream folds in as lumps and the finished soufflé turns grainy.
- Fold, do not beatThe meringue must be genuinely cool before the cream goes in, or the cream will slacken. Fold in thirds with a spatula and stop while a few streaks remain.
Frozen desserts of this kind are called still-frozen because nothing turns them: the mixture is aerated in advance with beaten whites and whipped cream, sealed in a mould, and buried in a churn or wooden pail of cracked ice and rock salt, where the brine drops well below 32F and draws the heat out over several hours. Recipes for them are common in American cookbooks of the later nineteenth century, by which time ice delivery was established in towns and a household could count on a block in the icebox. Maple gave New England and Great Lakes cooks a sweetener that was local, cheap in season, and strongly flavoured enough to carry a dish on its own — sylrup and sugar turn up in this period in everything from pies and parfaits to boiled frostings. The attribution to Mrs Alvah W. Palmer marks this as a contributor's recipe printed under her own name, which is why the book reads less like a single author's system and more like an exchange of household recipes.