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Three Eggs (Two ounces of Flour)
Two ounces of Flour.
One gill of Oyster Liquor.
One ounce of Butter.
One gill of Cream.
Two Whitings (half a pound of Fish). Twelve Oysters. Blanch and beard the oysters and cut each one in four pieces. Put the butter and flour into a stewpan and mix them well together over the fire, add the one gill of oyster liquor and stir till it thickens and the flour is cooked. When cooked, put this panada and the meat of whitings into a mortar, and pound them well together, adding the three eggs, one at a time, also a little salt and cayenne pepper. Pass this mixture through a hair-sieve; stir the oysters and the whipped cream lightly in. Well butter your mould, pour in the mixture, cover it with buttered paper, and steam it gently for half an hour.
SAUCE FOR OYSTER SOUFFLÉ.
Ingredients.
This is the body of a steamed oyster and whiting soufflé — closer to what we would now call a mousseline than a risen soufflé. The page has been split across a heading, so the quantities of whiting and oysters are missing; read the method carefully before shopping.
- The missing quantitiesThe verbatim text gives flour, butter, cream, oyster liquor and eggs, but never states how much fish or how many oysters. Something in the region of 12 oz (350 g) of skinned whiting fillet and a dozen or so oysters would suit a panada of this size, but that is a modern guess rather than anything the book supplies: the original is genuinely silent on the point.
- A gillA quarter of a pint, about 5 imperial fl oz or 140 ml (some books reckon it loosely as half a cup, 4 fl oz). Two gills here in total: one of oyster liquor for the panada, one of cream to be whipped and folded in at the end.
- Blanch and beardWarm the oysters in their own liquor only until the edges ruffle — well under a minute — then lift them out and trim off the dark frill. The liquor is then strained and used for the panada. Anything longer than a brief plumping and the oysters turn to rubber inside the finished mousse.
- PanadaThe cooked flour-and-butter-and-liquor paste. Stir it over heat until it leaves the side of the pan cleanly and no longer tastes of raw flour, then let it cool to blood heat before pounding, or the eggs will begin to set.
- Mortar and hair-sieveA food processor does the pounding in a minute. The sieving step still matters: press the mixture through a fine-mesh sieve with the back of a ladle to catch sinew and any small bones, which is what gives the mousseline its texture.
- Order of assemblyCream and oysters go in last and are folded, not beaten. The whipped cream is the only lift this dish has — there is no separately whisked egg white — so overworking it at this stage gives a dense, close-grained result.
- The steamingButtered mould, buttered paper on top, and gentle steam for half an hour. Keep the water at a bare tremble; a hard boil makes the mixture swell and weep. It is done when the centre feels set and springs back to a light press.
- YieldAt the guessed proportions above, roughly a 1–1.5 pint mould, enough for about four as a first course, or more if turned out and sliced. Serve it hot with the sauce whose ingredients the book was about to list.
Whiting was the workhorse of nineteenth-century fish cookery in Britain: cheap, white, fine-fleshed and low enough in fat that it pounded to a smooth paste, which made it a common base for quenelles, forcemeats and mousselines in professional kitchens. Dishes of this kind belong to the French repertoire that British high-class cooks drew on heavily in the era of Careme and Soyer — a panada bound with eggs, lightened with cream, steamed in a mould and served under a sauce — and the name soufflé was used loosely for any such light moulded mixture, whether or not it rose. The oysters are worth noting too. In the period these books were written oysters were still a common rather than a luxury ingredient in Britain, plentiful enough to be chopped into a forcemeat by the dozen, and their liquor was treated as a free and valuable stock. The decline of the native beds, generally put down to overfishing and pollution in the nineteenth century, is why a recipe that once read as thrifty now reads as extravagant.