Home › Vegetables › Corn Souffle
Corn Souffle
1 T butter. 2 T flour. 1 C milk. 1 can corn. 1 1/2 t salt. 1/8 t pepper. ½ t salt ½ t pepper 2 eggs Melt butter, mix with flour and pour milk on gradually. Bring to boiling point, stirring constantly. Add corn, seasoning, yolks of eggs, well beaten, and stiffly beaten whites. Turn into buttered baking dish and bake in a moderate oven, temperature 325 degrees. Six servings. Mrs. F. J. Wright.
The ingredient list as printed is incomplete — only the salt, pepper and eggs survived the typesetting, though the method calls for butter, flour, milk and corn. Treat it as a thin white sauce bound with egg, and use a standard proportion.
- The missing quantitiesA standard thin white sauce for six would be about 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour and 1 cup milk, with roughly 2 cups corn. This is a reconstruction, not a recovery: what the original intended is unrecoverable from this page.
- "t" and the pepperBy the usual convention of such books, "t" is a teaspoon and "T" a tablespoon; only "t" appears here. A teaspoon and a half of black pepper is aggressive by current taste; a half teaspoon suits most palates, and the salt can drop to a teaspoon if the corn is canned and already salted.
- The cornThe recipe specifies only "corn," and canned corn would have been the likely choice; whether cream-style or whole-kernel cannot be told from the page. Fresh kernels cut from four or five ears work, as does thawed frozen corn, but add a little of the milk back if the mixture looks dry.
- TemperatureThe number is given outright: 325 degrees, alongside "moderate oven." That is the low end of "moderate" and correct here, since a hotter oven sets the outside before the centre catches up and the whole thing collapses.
- Time, which is not givenExpect 35 to 45 minutes in a buttered 1½-quart dish. It is done when the centre is set and no longer wobbles as a liquid, and a knife inserted off-centre comes out clean.
- The hingeCool the white sauce until it is warm rather than hot before the yolks go in, and fold the whites in three additions with a light hand. Stirring the whites in, or adding them to a near-boiling base, gives a dense corn pudding instead of a soufflé.
- What kind of soufflé this isThere is no water bath and no collar, and the rise is modest — this is a homely baked corn pudding lifted by beaten whites, not a restaurant soufflé. Serve it straight from the dish, promptly, as it sinks within minutes.
Corn dishes bound with a flour-and-milk sauce and lightened with beaten whites were a fixture of American community cookbooks, arriving with the spread of white-sauce cookery taught in the domestic science schools — the melt-butter, mix-flour, add-milk-gradually formula was generic to that teaching rather than the invention of any one author. Canned sweet corn made the dish practical year-round and cheap enough for a congregation supper, which is why it sits in the vegetable chapter rather than among the more ambitious entrées. The word "soufflé" was applied loosely in these books to almost anything containing whipped egg white, and a contributor like Mrs. Wright would have expected a modest, forgiving rise rather than a dramatic one. Only three of its ingredients made it into print.