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Corn-Meal Soufflé
1/2 pint (I cup) corn meal 1 pint (2 cups) hot milk 1/4 teaspoonful salt 5 eggs Cook the corn meal, either yellow or white, in the hot milk in a casserole until well thickened, stirring frequently; remove from the fire, add the salt, then beat in the yolks of the eggs one at a time, add the stiffly beaten whites of the eggs. Bake in a moderate oven until light and nicely browned-it takes about forty-five minutes.
Serve at once from the baking dish, either with butter or meat gravy.
A cornmeal mush lightened with five eggs and baked in the same vessel it was cooked in — closer to a spoonbread than to a French soufflé. Two details matter: the mush must be cool enough not to scramble the yolks, and the dish goes to the table the moment it leaves the oven.
- The casseroleHere a casserole is a pot that can go on direct heat and then into the oven and to the table. A 2-quart heavy saucepan and a buttered 1 1/2- to 2-quart baking dish do the same work; cook the mush in the pan, then transfer.
- Half a pint means a cupThe original helpfully glosses its own measures: 1/2 pint cornmeal is 1 cup, 1 pint hot milk is 2 cups. That 1:2 ratio makes a genuinely stiff mush, stiffer than breakfast porridge, which is what carries the beaten whites.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350F, the usual modern reading of the term. Forty-five minutes is right for a 2-quart dish; the center should be set and puffed with no liquid wobble.
- Cool the mush before the yolksThis is the hinge. Beat the yolks in one at a time only after the mush has stopped steaming hard, or they will set into threads. If in doubt, temper: stir a spoonful of hot mush into the yolks first.
- Cornmeal has changedPeriod cornmeal was usually stone-ground and thirstier than modern degerminated supermarket meal. Fine stone-ground yellow or white meal gives the closest texture; with a coarse grind, expect to cook it several minutes longer and add a splash more milk.
- Fold, do not stirThe whites are the only leavening — there is no baking powder here. Beat them to firm but not dry peaks and fold in two additions, keeping the mixture streaky rather than smooth.
- SaltA quarter teaspoon is restrained for a dish this size. Half to three-quarters of a teaspoon suits modern palates, especially if you are serving it with butter rather than gravy.
- Yield and servingServes four to six as a side. It falls within a few minutes of leaving the oven, so bring the dish straight to the table; leftovers are best sliced and fried.
Baked cornmeal-and-egg dishes run through nineteenth-century American cookery under a long list of names — spoonbread, batter bread, Awendaw — and are generally traced to the Southern habit of enriching plain mush with eggs and milk until it could be eaten with a spoon. Calling it a soufflé, as this book does, was a common turn-of-the-century move: French terminology lent respectability to homely ingredients, and cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s applied the word to almost anything lightened with beaten egg whites. A mush that thickens on the fire and then bakes in place is close to the ideal demonstration of single-vessel cookery, the sort that could go from stovetop to oven to table.