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Meat Souffle
Nellie McCready. 1 C cream sauce, seasoned with pepper and salt 1 t chopped parsley 1 oz. chopped onion Stir into sauce 1 cup chopped meat or fowl. When well mixed add beaten yolks of 2 eggs; cook one minute and set away to cool. Then stir in the whites, beaten into a stiff broth. Bake in a buttered dish twenty minutes. Serve plain for luncheon or with mushroom dressing for dinner.
Mrs. W. J. Dillon.
CHICKEN LOAF-(2 Portions) 1/2 C cooked chicken 1/2 C cooked veal 12 C soft bread crumbs 12 t salt 1/8 t celery salt 1 t chopped parsely 1 egg 1/2 C milk Cut up chicken and veal. Mix with bread crumbs, add the salt, celery salt, parsley, egg and milk. Bake in a well buttered pan thirty minutes in a moderate oven.
Mrs. S. C. Kimball.
Two related leftover dishes on one page, both built on the same logic: bound cooked meat, stretched with sauce or crumbs and lifted with egg. The typesetting has suffered, so a few quantities need reading through.
- "Beaten into a stiff broth"This is a printer's error for stiff froth — the whites go in as a meringue. Fold them in with a spatula rather than stirring, and get the soufflé into the oven immediately; the batter will not hold.
- Cream sauceA cup of medium white sauce: 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour, 1 cup milk, cooked until it coats a spoon. In cookbooks of this period "cream sauce" ordinarily meant a milk-based white sauce, not sweetened cream.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given for the souffle. A moderate-to-fairly-hot oven, around 375F, suits the stated twenty minutes; a dish of about a quart will do. It should be set at the edge and barely trembling at the centre. "Moderate oven" for the chicken loaf is conventionally read as about 350F.
- The onionAn ounce of chopped onion is a small handful, roughly 2 to 3 tablespoons. Sweat it in butter before it goes into the sauce -- twenty minutes of baking will not soften raw onion, and the souffle will taste sharp.
- Garbled amounts in the chicken loaf"12 C soft bread crumbs" and "12 t salt" are 1/2 cup and 1/2 teaspoon; 12 cups of crumbs against 1 cup of meat is plainly impossible. The recipe is stated as two portions, which fits half a cup of each meat.
- The one-minute yolk cookingStirring the yolks into the hot sauce and cooking briefly thickens the base and takes the raw edge off the egg. Keep the heat low and stir constantly or you will get scrambled flecks through the finished soufflé.
- "Mushroom dressing"Meaning a mushroom sauce — sliced mushrooms cooked in butter and finished in more of the same white sauce, spooned over at table.
- YieldThe soufflé serves two to three as a luncheon dish. It falls within minutes of leaving the oven, so bring it straight to the table.
Community cookbooks of this kind -- compiled locally and sold to raise money -- are useful records of what middle-class American families did with the remains of a roast. Both dishes here are frugal by design: a cup of chopped cooked meat, extended with sauce and eggs or with crumbs and milk, and given a French name. Savoury souffles built on a white-sauce base were a staple of the American cooking-school tradition of the late nineteenth century, and Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book (1896) treats white sauce as a foundation from which souffles, croquettes and creamed dishes all follow. That the same page offers the dish "plain for luncheon or with mushroom dressing for dinner" reflects a distinction between the two meals: luncheon the more informal, dinner expecting a sauce.