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Peach Soufflé
6 ripe peaches 4 heaping tablespoonfuls (4 ozs.) sugar I heaping tablespoonful (I oz.) butter 1/4 pint (1/2 cup) milk 1/2 pint (I cup) water 2 heaping tablespoonfuls (2 ozs.) flour 3 eggs 1 egg white Peel the peaches, put them into a casserole with the sugar and the water; cook till tender; then rub through a sieve.
Blend the butter and flour in a saucepan over the fire, add the milk gradually, and stir over the fire till it boils; then add the peach purée and boil again for three minutes.
Remove the saucepan from the fire; add the yolks of eggs one by one; then the whites of eggs beaten up stiffly. Put into a buttered earthenware dish and bake for half an hour.
It may be steamed for three-quarters of an hour.
A soufflé pudding rather than a true soufflé: a flour-thickened panada carries the fruit, so it rises modestly and holds its shape instead of collapsing at the table. A few of the book's conventions need translating.
- The casserole is the potHere a casserole is a lidded earthenware or flameproof pot used on the stove, not a baking dish: the peaches are stewed in it and the pudding is baked separately in a buttered earthenware dish. Any saucepan will do for the stewing.
- MeasuresThe weights in parentheses settle the ambiguity: 4 oz sugar (about 1/2 cup), 1 oz butter (2 tablespoons), 2 oz flour (a scant 1/2 cup). The recipe's own bracketed equivalents are US measure: 1/4 pint milk is 1/2 cup and 1/2 pint water is 1 cup.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. Bake at 350F; the mixture is egg-rich and browns quickly at anything hotter. Half an hour in a dish of 1 1/2 to 2 quarts is right, longer if the dish is deep and narrow.
- Reduce the puréeThe hinge of the dish. Six peaches cooked in a cup of water give a very slack purée, and if it goes into the panada wet the soufflé will not set. Cook the fruit uncovered until most of the water has gone, or boil the combined mixture past the stated three minutes until it is thick enough to hold a spoon upright.
- The whitesFold in the beaten whites with a light hand once the base has cooled to warm, not hot, or the yolks will curdle and the whites deflate. Get it into the buttered dish and the oven immediately.
- The steaming optionThree-quarters of an hour steamed gives a denser, moister pudding, closer to a fruit-flavoured custard sponge. Cover the dish with buttered paper or foil so condensation does not fall onto the surface.
- PeachesThe recipe calls simply for ripe peaches; freestone fruit is the easiest to peel and stone. Underripe supermarket fruit will need more sugar and longer cooking; drained canned peaches work but should be simmered without added water.
- YieldServes four to six. Serve straight from the oven with cream or a thin custard; it sinks a little as it stands, which is expected of this style.
Books devoted to casserole cookery appeared in numbers in Britain and America in the early years of the twentieth century, when glazed earthenware and the newer flameproof wares were being marketed to households as economical: one vessel that could go over the fire and then to the table, saving fuel and washing up. A fruit soufflé of this kind belongs to the older French repertoire of entremets — soufflé simply means "blown" or "puffed" — but the version here is the domesticated English one, built on a butter-and-flour panada rather than a pastry cream, which makes it far more forgiving in an unreliable coal oven. The offer to steam it instead is telling: a steamer was said to be more dependable than an oven whose temperature no one could read, and the same batter cheerfully became a boiled pudding when it had to.