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Veal Souffle
Make a sauce of one tablespoorr of butter, one tablespoon of flour, one cup of hot milk or stock, half a teaspoon of salt and a few grains of pepper. Add one cup of chopped veal and one-fourth cup of stale bread crumbs. Remove from the fire, add the yolks of two eggs beaten light. Fold in the whites beaten stiff. Bake thirty minutes in a buttered mold set in a pan of hot water in a moderate oven.
A standard leftover dish: a thick béchamel bound with egg yolks, lightened with whites, and baked in a water bath. The whole thing hinges on the sauce being thick enough to hold the whites without deflating them.
- Moderate ovenSet the oven to 350F. At the period's higher "quick" heat the outside sets and cracks before the centre coagulates, and the water bath cannot compensate.
- The water bath is not optionalSet the buttered mold in a pan with hot water reaching halfway up its side. It keeps the egg mixture below the point at which it curdles and weeps, which is the usual failure of a baked soufflé of this kind.
- The veal is already cookedThis reads as a leftover recipe. Use roast or braised veal, chopped fine or pulsed briefly in a processor — roughly 5 to 6 oz of cooked meat gives the cup called for.
- Sauce consistencyA tablespoon each of butter and flour to a full cup of liquid gives a fairly thin sauce. Cook it down until it coats a spoon heavily and pulls from the pan, or the meat and crumbs will sink.
- Cool before the yolks"Remove from the fire, add the yolks" means let the sauce stop steaming first. Yolks stirred into a boiling sauce scramble in threads.
- Stale bread crumbsDry crumbs from day-old bread, not the fine sandy commercial sort and not panko. They are here to absorb moisture from the meat, so soft fresh crumbs will slacken the mixture.
- Mold size and donenessA 1-quart dish or four 6-oz ramekins. Ramekins want about 20 to 25 minutes; the larger mold takes the full thirty or a little more, and is done when the centre is just set and a knife comes out clean.
- Yield and servingServes three to four as a light main course. The dish is deliberately mild and takes well to a white, tomato or mushroom sauce.
Savoury soufflés of minced cooked meat were a staple of turn-of-the-century American household cookery, where they solved the problem of the Sunday roast on Tuesday: a cup of chopped scraps, stretched with sauce and eggs, arrived at table looking like a made dish rather than a remnant. Veal was a natural candidate because it was widely available in the era of urban butcher shops, and so mild that it took whatever seasoning and sauce were put to it. The technique — a thick panada bound with yolks, lightened with whipped whites, baked in a bain-marie — comes out of French professional practice, filtered into English-language domestic manuals through the cooking-school movement of the 1880s and 1890s.