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Four Eggs
Ingredients.
One ounce of Butter.
One ounce of Flour.
Salt. One gill of Milk.
One dessertspoonful of Castor Sugar.
Half a teaspoonful of Essence of Vanilla.
Butter a pint-and-half soufflé-tin; tie a band of buttered paper round the tin, coming two inches above it. Melt an ounce of butter, add to it an ounce of flour, mix them well together, and add the castor sugar and milk; stir this over the fire till it thickens. Then take it off the fire, and add, one at a time, the yolks of three eggs, beating all well together. Put a pinch of salt to the four whites of egg, whip them to a stiff froth, and stir lightly to the mixture; add the vanilla essence, pour it all into the buttered tin, and steam from twenty to thirty minutes. Turn it out on to a hot dish, and pour some wine sauce or custard sauce round it.
A steamed vanilla soufflé built on a sweet panada, firm enough to be turned out of its mould — closer to what we would now call a steamed pudding than to the fragile baked soufflé. The hinge is the steam: it must stay gentle, or the mixture puffs violently and collapses.
- Keep the water at a bare trembleA hard boil drives the soufflé up against the paper collar and it falls the moment it leaves the steamer. Set the tin in a covered steamer or in a pan of water reaching halfway up the sides, and hold the water just below a simmer for the full 20–30 minutes.
- A gillIn a British book of this period a gill is a quarter of an imperial pint — 5 fl oz, about 150 ml. Not the American half-cup.
- The tinA pint-and-a-half mould is about 30 imperial fl oz, roughly 850 ml. Any straight-sided ovenproof basin or charlotte mould of that size works; the buttered paper band standing two inches proud is a genuine help, since the mixture rises well above the rim.
- Three yolks, four whitesThe count is deliberate, not a misprint — the extra white lightens a mixture already heavy with panada. Keep the spare yolk for the custard sauce.
- Castor sugar and dessertspoonfulCastor sugar is superfine; ordinary granulated will dissolve well enough in the hot panada. A dessertspoon is two teaspoons, so about 10 g of sugar — this pudding is barely sweet and relies on the sauce.
- Essence of vanillaUse vanilla extract at the same measure, added off the heat as directed so the aroma is not driven off.
- FoldingLet the panada cool to warm before the yolks go in, or they will scramble at the edge of the pan. Fold the whites in two or three additions with a large spoon or spatula, stopping while a few streaks remain rather than stirring them smooth.
- Turning outRest the mould a minute, run a knife inside the paper, and invert onto a warmed dish. Unlike a baked soufflé this one holds its shape, but it still wants to be sauced and served at once.
- YieldThree to four helpings as a pudding course.
Recipe collections of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries often distinguish two kinds of souffle: the baked kind, sent to table in its dish and eaten within minutes, and the steamed kind seen here, stiffened with a butter-and-flour panada so that it can be unmoulded, sauced and carried the length of a dining room. A steamed pudding may well have suited a kitchen working from a coal range, where oven heat was harder to regulate than a pan of water on the hob. The buttered paper collar, the pint-and-a-half tin and the accompanying wine or custard sauce are all common features of English pudding cookery of the period.