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Brown Bread Iced Soufflé
Ingredients.
Four ounces of brown Breadcrumbs (made from Hovis bread). One ounce ratafia Crumbs.
One teaspoonful of Maraschino.
Half a pint of Custard (made from Ice Pudding recipe). Half a pint of whipped Cream.
Half a teaspoonful of ground Cinnamon.
Three Whites of Eggs (stiffly whisked).
When the custard is quite cold, mix all the ingredients lightly together. Tie a band of paper around a soufflé case and pour in the mixture.
Place the soufflé case into an ice cave charged with crushed ice and coarse salt, and freeze six hours. If small ramekin cases are used, allow two and a half to three hours. When frozen remove the paper, sprinkle a few ratafia crumbs on the top and serve.
An iced soufflé of the Edwardian type: not baked at all, but frozen in a paper-collared case so it stands proud like a risen soufflé. The method is sound in outline, but one element of it does not survive modern food-safety practice.
- The raw whites are the problemThree stiffly whisked egg whites are folded in cold and the mixture is then frozen for six hours. Nothing in the process heats the whites, and freezing does not destroy Salmonella; it merely suspends it. Shell eggs eaten raw carry a real risk. Use a current recipe for iced soufflé if you want to make one.
- The custard is unspecified"Half a pint of custard (made from Ice Pudding recipe)" points to another page of the book, so the reader of this page alone has no idea whether the base was cooked, or how far. An egg custard for freezing is normally taken to somewhere around 75-82C; a recipe that cannot tell you what it contains cannot tell you it is safe.
- Half a pintImperial, so 10 fl oz, about a US cup and a fifth. The same applies to the cream. Four ounces of crumbs is by weight, roughly 115 g.
- Ratafia crumbsRatafias are small hard almond macaroons, close to Italian amaretti. Victorian and Edwardian ratafias took their characteristic flavour from bitter almond, which contains amygdalin; commercial biscuits today use sweet almond and a controlled flavouring instead. Crushed amaretti are the nearest modern equivalent.
- HovisA brand, not a bread type: a wheatgerm-enriched brown loaf whose name is generally traced to the 1890s. Any dense wholemeal loaf gives the same effect. Many brown-bread ice recipes dry and lightly toast the crumbs first, which is where the caramel note comes from, though this one does not say so.
- The ice caveA lidded metal box packed with crushed ice and coarse salt, which drops the brine well below 0C and freezes the mixture without churning. A domestic freezer reaches a similar temperature but circulates cold air rather than surrounding the mould with brine, so the old six-hour timing is not directly transferable.
- MaraschinoThe cherry-stone liqueur from Dalmatia, dry and faintly bitter, not the sweet syrup from a jar of cocktail cherries. One teaspoonful in this quantity is a seasoning rather than a flavour.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield or portion count. Half a pint of custard and half a pint of cream is a pint before the crumbs and the whisked whites are added, so the finished volume is appreciably more than that.
Brown bread ices were a well-established English confection of the nineteenth century, the toasted crumbs giving a nutty, almost malted flavour. The iced soufflé applied the same idea in the French manner: a paper band tied round the case lets the mixture be filled above the rim so that, when the collar is peeled away, the frozen cream stands up in imitation of a hot soufflé straight from the oven. That trompe-l'oeil was the point. The specification of Hovis by name is a small period marker.