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Four Eggs (Rind of one Lemon)
Rind of one Lemon.
Put the milk on to boil; sprinkle in the semolina and sugar; add the peel of the lemon, cut very thin; stir till it thickens, then take out the lemon-peel. Let it cool a little, and then stir in the yolks of three eggs and the whites of four eggs whipped to a stiff froth. Grease a soufflé mould, pour in the mixture, and steam it for twenty minutes.
A steamed semolina soufflé of the kind Victorian cooks turned out as a light hot pudding. The page as printed is a fragment of an ingredient list followed by the method, so the quantities need reconstructing before you start.
- The missing quantitiesOnly the eggs and the lemon rind are given; the milk, semolina and sugar amounts have been lost with the heading. A conventional ratio for this style of pudding is 1 pint (570 ml) milk, 2 oz (55 g) semolina and 2 oz (55 g) caster sugar to four eggs, but that is a reconstruction, not what the book says.
- Egg countThree yolks and four whites. The imbalance is probably deliberate rather than a misprint: the extra white would give lift without extra richness. Save the fourth yolk for a custard.
- SemolinaUse fine semolina (durum wheat), not semolina flour or couscous. Rain it into the milk in a thin stream while whisking or it will set in lumps.
- The lemon peelPare it in wide strips with no white pith, which turns bitter on long contact with hot milk. It infuses while the semolina cooks and comes out before the eggs go in.
- Cool before the yolks"Let it cool a little" is the hinge. Semolina comes off the heat near boiling and will scramble yolks on contact; let it drop to hand-warm, beat in the yolks, then fold the whites in two additions.
- Steaming a soufflé mouldGrease it well, fill no more than three-quarters, cover the top with greased paper or foil, and set it on a trivet in a pan of gently simmering water reaching halfway up. Twenty minutes is right for a 1-pint mould; a deeper one wants closer to 30 to 35 minutes, tested with a skewer.
- What it will and will not doA steamed soufflé does not tower like a baked one; expect a soft, faintly wobbling pudding that sinks a little on turning out. Serve immediately, with lemon or jam sauce.
- YieldFour eggs and a pint of milk serve four to five as a pudding course.
Semolina reached British kitchens in quantity in the nineteenth century as a cheap durum-wheat product, and cookery writers of the period leaned on it heavily for nursery and invalid puddings — boiled with milk, sweetened, and flavoured with lemon peel, bitter almond or vanilla. Dressing that plain base up with whipped whites and steaming it in a fluted soufflé mould was the professional cook's way of promoting it to the dinner table, the steamed "soufflé pudding" being the version that would hold a few minutes longer while the previous course was cleared, unlike the soufflé proper, baked and served at a run. The lemon rind is doing the work of the flavouring here, cut thin and withdrawn before the eggs go in — a technique that predates commercial extracts.