Home › Sweets › Soufflée de Chocolat
Soufflée de Chocolat
(Chocolate Soufflée.) Ingredients.
Quarter of a pound of Chocolate.
One ounce of Butter.
Three-quarters of an ounce of Flour.
Three Yolks and four Whites of Eggs.
One gill of Milk.
One teaspoonful of Vanilla Essence.
Half an ounce of Sugar.
Grate the chocolate and mix it with the milk; boil it till quite smooth. Melt the butter and flour and stir them till smooth; add the chocolate and milk, mix well, boil them, and then take them off the fire. Add the yolks of eggs one by one, then the essence. Whip the whites of the eggs to a stiff froth and add them lightly. Turn this mixture into a prepared tin, and steam three quarters of an hour to an hour. Turn it out, and pour custard sauce round. Sauce-three yolks of eggs, one gill of milk, and one dessertspoonful of sugar.
This is a steamed soufflé pudding rather than the puffed oven soufflé the name now suggests lat with a firmer set that survives being turned out of its mould. A few of the quantities and vessels need translating.
- A gillAn imperial gill is 5 fl oz, so a scant 2/3 US cup. The recipe uses one gill in the soufflé and another in the sauce.
- The chocolateQuarter of a pound is 4 oz. Chocolate sold for cookery at this date generally came as a solid cake of ground cocoa and sugar, though sweetness varied from maker to maker; a dark chocolate in the region of 55-60% is a reasonable modern stand-in. With only half an ounce of added sugar in the mixture, anything much sweeter will read as very sweet.
- The prepared tinA buttered and sugared charlotte mould or plain deep tin, filled no more than two-thirds, and covered with buttered paper or foil tied down so condensation cannot drip in.
- Steaming, not bakingThe mould sits in a covered steamer or on a trivet in a pan of barely simmering water reaching halfway up the sides. Keep the water at a tremble; a hard boil makes the pudding coarse and full of holes.
- The hingeFold the whites in three additions and stop the moment no white streaks remain. The chocolate panada is heavy and stiff, and over-folding is the one thing that reliably turns this into a dense chocolate brick.
- Testing and turning outAfter 45 minutes a skewer into the centre should come out with moist crumbs and the top spring back. Let it stand 5 minutes off the heat before inverting, or it will slump.
- The custard sauceThree yolks to one gill of milk is a very rich sauce, closer to a thick pouring custard. Cook it over a low heat or in a bain-marie to about 175-180F, stirring, and take it off before it approaches a simmer or the yolks will scramble.
- YieldThe quantities suggest about four servings, with enough sauce to pour around rather than over.
Steamed sweet souffl nineteenth-century professional repertoire, where a souffl mixture was understood as a panada butter, flour and liquid cooked to a paste enriched with yolks and lightened with whipped whites, a technique already long established by then. That base could be baked in a case, poached in a mould, or steamed, and the steamed version is often said to have had an obvious appeal in a large household, since it could be held over the water rather more forgivingly than an oven souffl . Chocolate itself was by this date a settled, if still slightly luxurious, kitchen ingredient in Britain, bought as a solid cake and grated rather than as chips or callets, which is why the first instruction is to grate it and dissolve it in milk. The custard poured around, not over, is the standard finish of the period.