Omelet Souffle
One cup of flour, one pint of milk, one tablespoon of sugar, butter size of a walnut. Scald milk, flour and butter.
After the batter is cold stir in yolks of five eggs. Add beaten whites just before baking. Bake in a quick oven and serve with hard sauce. - Mrs Antes Ruhl, Rockford, Ill.
A dessert soufflé built on a cooked flour-and-milk base, of the sort American cookbooks of the 1880s and 90s filed under eggs rather than puddings. The original gives no pan, no time and no oven number, so most of the work is filling those gaps.
- The hinge: fold, don't stirThe instruction to "add beaten whites just before baking" is the whole technique. Whites should go to soft, glossy peaks and be folded in with a spatula in two or three additions; stirring them in would knock out the air the dish rises on.
- Quick oven425–450F. That is hot for a soufflé of this size and will set the outside fast; many cooks would drop to 375F after the first ten minutes. Expect roughly 25–35 minutes in a two-quart dish, until puffed and set with a slight wobble at the centre.
- Butter the size of a walnutAbout 1 oz, or 2 tablespoons. Nineteenth-century butter measures were sized against nuts and eggs and are approximate by design.
- A pint of milkTwo cups. With one cup of flour this cooks down to a thick panade — a heavy, sauce-like base rather than a thin batter — which is what carries the yolks and supports the whites.
- "Scald" means cook it out"Scald" here most likely means more than warming the milk: combine milk, flour and butter and cook, whisking, until the mixture thickens, so the flour loses its raw taste. The recipe then says to let the batter go cold before stirring in the yolks — cool at least to lukewarm, or they will scramble.
- SugarOne tablespoon for five eggs is barely sweet by modern taste; the hard sauce served alongside would have supplied most of the sweetness. Two to three tablespoons in the base is defensible if the sauce is omitted.
- Hard sauceCreamed butter and powdered sugar, roughly one part butter to two of sugar, often flavoured with vanilla, nutmeg, brandy or sherry, and chilled firm. It melts into the hot soufflé at the table.
- Dish and yieldA buttered and sugared two-quart soufflé dish or deep baking dish. Serves four to six, and must go to the table the moment it leaves the oven — it begins to fall within a few minutes.
Community cookbooks like this one were assembled from contributed recipes, each signed with a name and a town, and the signature was part of the point: Mrs Antes Ruhl of Rockford was vouching for the dish. The construction here — milk and flour cooked to a paste, enriched with yolks, lightened with whipped whites — is the classic soufflé base. The hard sauce alongside is the English inheritance in the same dish, the standard accompaniment to plum pudding and steamed puddings generally, and its presence marks this as a dessert despite its filing under eggs. Whisking five whites to peaks took real work, whether by hand with a wire whisk or a flat wooden beater or with one of the rotary egg beaters widely available by the later nineteenth century.