Home › Cheese Recipes › Cheese Souffles
Cheese Souffles
6 heaping tablespoonfuls (3 I level tablespoonful flour ozs.) grated cheese 2 eggs oz.) butter Salt and pepper to taste I heaping tablespoonful (I 1 gill (1/2 cup) milk Melt the butter, stir in the flour, add the milk, and stir till it cooks for three minutes; remove from the fire, add the yolks of eggs well beaten, the cheese,
A very small cheese souffle built on a thick flour-and-milk panade, sized for two. The quantities are given in the doubled column style of the period, with weights beside the spoon measures.
- The measuresA gill is half a cup (4 fl oz). The cheese is 6 heaping tablespoons, about 3 oz grated; the butter is 1 heaping tablespoon, about 1 oz; the flour is a single level tablespoon.
- Cheese to useUnspecified 'grated cheese' in recipes of this sort was usually a dry hard cheese that grates cleanly - aged Cheddar, Cheshire, or Parmesan. Pre-shredded cheese carries anti-caking starch that thickens the base further; grate your own.
- The panade must be thickThe base -- One level tablespoon of flour to half a cup of milk gives a sauce of medium body rather than a stiff paste, so handle the folding gently. Three minutes of stirring over heat is to cook out the raw flour taste; keep it moving so it does not catch.
- Cool before the yolksRemove from the heat and let the base drop below scalding before the beaten yolks go in, or they will scramble in threads through the mixture.
- Finishing the souffleThe text breaks off before the whites are dealt with, but the two whites are implied: beat them to soft peaks and fold them in last, lightly, leaving streaks rather than beating them out.
- OvenThe recipe gives no oven or timing. A souffle this size will take a moderately hot oven, in the region of 375-400F, roughly 20 minutes in ramekins or 25 in a single dish; do not open the door early, and serve at once.
- SeasoningSalt cautiously; hard grating cheese is already salty. Mustard or cayenne, often found in cheese dishes of the period though not called for here, sharpens what is otherwise a rather flat mixture.
- YieldServes two as a light supper or first course, or four in very small ramekins alongside a salad.
Souffle is the past participle of souffler, to blow or puff, and by the late nineteenth century the dish - a white sauce enriched with yolks and lifted by beaten whites - was a familiar test of a trained cook. Cheese was among the cheapest flavourings, and cheese souffle appears frequently in household manuals. Measurement in gills with cup equivalents beside it suggests a British text adapted for American readers, or an American book still carrying older measures.