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Some Kitchen Kinks: Serve
APPENDIX Heat the rice in the milk, add the other ingredients, and cook slowly until the cheese is melted. Serve on crackers or toast.
The food value is not far from that of a pound of beef of average composition, and the calculated cost is 15 cents.
Corn and Cheese Souffle. 1 tablespoonful of butter. 1 tablespoonful of chopped green pepper. 1/4 cupful of flour. 2 cupsful of milk. of 1 cupful of chopped corn. 1 cupful of grated cheese. 3 eggs. 1/2 teaspoonful of salt.
Melt the butter and cook the pepper thoroughly in it. Make a sauce out of the flour, milk, and cheese as explained elsewhere; add the corn, cheese, yolks, and seasoning; cut and fold in the whites beaten stiffly; turn into a buttered baking dish and bake in a moderate oven 30 minutes.
The page opens mid-recipe — the rice-and-cheese dish above it is finished on the previous page — but the corn and cheese souffle is complete and workable. A few points in the ingredient list need untangling before you start.
- The cheese appears twiceThe list gives one cup of grated cheese, but the method has you melt cheese into the white sauce and then add cheese again with the corn. Use the single cup, stirred into the hot sauce off the heat until smooth; the second mention appears to be a duplication rather than a call for more cheese.
- Moderate oven350F. A souffle of this size wants 30 to 35 minutes, until the top is set and browned and the centre only just trembles.
- Butter and flour do not matchOne tablespoon of butter to a quarter cup of flour is not a balanced roux. Use four tablespoons of butter — one to cook the pepper, three more with the flour — or the sauce will be pasty.
- Chopped cornThis means kernels cut from the cob, roughly chopped so they do not sink. Canned corn, drained, or thawed frozen kernels both work; a cup is about two ears.
- Grated cheeseIn an American kitchen of this period this would most likely be a plain firm cheddar, dry enough to grate on a box grater. A sharp aged cheddar suits the dish.
- Folding the whitesThis is the hinge. Let the cheese sauce cool to warm before you add the yolks, and fold the stiff whites in in two additions with a cutting motion. Whites folded into a boiling-hot base deflate and the souffle bakes flat.
- The dishA buttered two-quart dish, straight-sided if you have it, filled no more than three-quarters. Do not open the oven for the first 20 minutes.
- YieldFour servings as a light main course with bread and a salad, six as a side. Serve it the moment it leaves the oven.
This comes from the appendix of a general household manual, where recipes were being priced as well as tested — note the line above about food value "not far from that of a pound of beef" at a calculated cost of 15 cents. That is the language of the home economics movement, which by the 1900s was applying calorie and protein tables to family menus and arguing that cheese, eggs and milk could stand in for meat at a fraction of the cost. Cheese souffles and rarebits show up repeatedly in such books for exactly that reason. The corn and green pepper mark it as an American recipe of the season; sweet corn was a summer crop eaten fresh from the cob, and the pepper is used here sparingly as a flavouring rather than as a vegetable in its own right.