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Semolina Soufflé
Ingredients.
One pint of Milk.
Three ounces of Semolina.
Two ounces of Castor Sugar.
The page as printed is only the ingredient panel; the method that would have followed it is missing, and so is at least one essential ingredient. Read the points below before treating this as a complete recipe.
- Eggs are missingNo soufflé sets and rises without eggs, and none are listed here. A semolina soufflé of this scale conventionally takes three to four eggs, yolks beaten into the cooled panada and whites whisked stiff and folded in last. Whatever else you do, do not expect the three listed ingredients alone to behave like a soufflé.
- Semolina, then and nowVictorian and Edwardian semolina was a fine or medium hard-wheat middling, close to what is sold today as semolina flour or fine semolina rather than the coarse couscous-grade sold for dusting pizza peels. The finer the grain, the smoother the finished panada.
- Castor sugarCaster sugar, i.e. superfine granulated. Ordinary granulated will work in a cooked milk base since it dissolves anyway; use superfine if you are also sweetening whisked whites.
- MeasuresAn imperial pint is 20 fl oz, about 570 ml, not the American 16 oz. Three ounces of semolina is roughly 85 g and two ounces of sugar roughly 55 g. At that ratio the cooked base is thick and spoon-standing, which is what a soufflé panada should be.
- The hinge: cook the grain outSemolina must be simmered in the milk until it loses its raw, chalky bite, usually eight to twelve minutes with steady stirring. Undercooked grain gives a gritty soufflé that no amount of whisked white will rescue, and the mixture must then be cooled to blood heat before yolks go in.
- Oven and dishThe page gives no method and no oven direction, so any temperature here is a modern inference: for a baked semolina soufflé, something in the region of 350F/180C in a buttered and sugared straight-sided dish, roughly 30 to 40 minutes for a pint-scale mixture. The same base can instead be steamed in a mould, which is more forgiving and gives a denser pudding.
- YieldA pint of milk with these proportions serves four to six as a hot pudding, and it must go to the table straight from the oven.
- Use a full modern recipeBecause the printed page gives neither method nor egg quantity, treat it as a historical record of proportions and follow a complete semolina soufflé or semolina pudding recipe for the working detail.
Semolina belongs to the family of milk-and-grain puddings that dominated the English nursery and dining room alike in the nineteenth century, alongside sago, tapioca, ground rice and vermicelli. The soufflé treatment is the professional cook's way of raising such a base above the schoolroom: the same cooked milk panada, lightened with whisked whites, appears throughout French practice as a semolina soufflé, and its arrival in English high-class cookery books reflects the general adoption of French kitchen method in the great houses and hotels of the period. Hard-wheat semolina itself came into wide British use in the second half of the century, a spread often linked to the rise of roller-milling and its separation of the coarse middlings from the flour, and the granular product proved ideal for puddings because it thickens smoothly without the pastiness of wheat flour. The bare ingredient list here is a reminder that books of this type were written for cooks already trained in the method, who needed the proportions and nothing else.