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Raspberry Soufflé
1/2 pint (I cup) raspberries I heaping tablespoonful (I 2 heaping tablespoonfuls (2 ozs.) sugar oz.) flour 3 tablespoonfuls cream 4 tablespoonfuls water 2 eggs I heaping tablespoonful (I oz.) butter Put the raspberries into a saucepan with the sugar and the water; stir over the fire with a wooden spoon till the fruit is tender, then rub through a sieve; return to the pan, add the butter, flour, and cream; stir until it boils, remove from the fire, add the yolks of eggs and the whites stiffly beaten.
Turn into a buttered earthenware dish and bake in a moderate oven for twenty minutes.
Serve at once.
A small fruit soufflé built on a thick cooked purée rather than a milk panada. The quantities are for one or two invalids, so expect a modest dish rather than a dinner-party centrepiece.
- The stray lineThe "2 tablespoonfuls sago" printed at the end is a stray from an adjacent recipe, not part of this one. Ignore it; sago has no part in the method as written.
- UnitsA half pint of raspberries is the cup the author gives, roughly 4 to 5 oz of fruit. "Heaping tablespoonful" is glossed as 1 oz for both flour and butter, and the sugar as 2 oz, so weigh rather than scoop if you want the ratio to hold.
- Oven"a moderate oven" is usually rendered as somewhere around 350F, though the book gives no temperature. Twenty minutes at that heat suits a shallow dish; a deeper dish will need longer and will be harder to judge.
- The hingeThe yolks go in only after the thickened purée has come off the heat, and the beaten whites go in last, folded rather than stirred. Add yolks to a boiling mixture and they scramble; beat the whites in and you lose the rise entirely.
- SievingRubbing the cooked fruit through a sieve removes the raspberry seeds, which are unpleasant in a light invalid dish. A fine mesh sieve and the back of a ladle does it quickly.
- The baseFlour and butter stirred into hot purée will go lumpy unless you work quickly; rubbing them together into a paste first and whisking that in gives a smoother result. It must boil to cook out the raw flour taste.
- Dish and vessel"Buttered earthenware dish" is the baking dish; the "saucepan" earlier is a saucepan in the modern sense. Butter it thoroughly and, if you want height, dust the butter with sugar so the mixture can climb.
- Serving"Serve at once" is literal; a soufflé of this size will begin to sink soon after leaving the oven. It makes roughly one full portion, or two small ones.
The scale and ingredients -- eggs, cream, a little butter and fruit, nothing highly spiced, nothing fried -- are typical of the invalid cookery found in turn-of-the-century household manuals, when serious illness was nursed at home and the sickroom tray was the cook's responsibility; the stray sago line points the same way, sago, arrowroot and rice being staples of such pages. A soufflé suits the purpose because beaten egg white makes a dish look generous while weighing almost nothing, and raspberries were commonly reckoned in domestic tradition to be cooling and mildly acid, and so likely to tempt a dull palate. The name is the French for "blown" or "puffed up", and the word is recorded in English for such dishes from the early nineteenth century.