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Chocolate (Yolks of egg whites of eggs)
yolks of 3 egg whites of 3 eggs 1 teaspoon vanilla Melt butter; add flour; when smooth, add milk; cook five minutes; add sugar and salt. Melt chocolate; add hot water and flour mixture; cook five minutes; cool; add yolks of eggs beaten well; cut and fold in the well-beaten whites. Flavor; bake in a buttered baking dish in a moderate oven twenty to thirty minutes. Serve immediately with sugar and cream, or beaten cream, or butter and sugar sauce. 4 cup bread crumbs 2 cups scalded milk
This is a baked chocolate soufflé built on a thick white sauce base, and the page has come down to us with its ingredient list mangled — only the eggs and vanilla survive in usable form. Read the method carefully before committing to it.
- The missing quantitiesThe printed ingredient column has been lost except for the eggs and vanilla; the amounts of butter, flour, milk, sugar, salt, chocolate and hot water are simply not on the page. The trailing "4 cup bread crumbs 2 cups scalded milk" almost certainly belongs to the neighbouring recipe and should be ignored here. Any figures would be invention, so treat this as a method to read rather than a recipe to follow exactly.
- What the method actually describesButter and flour cooked to a roux, milk added and cooked out, sweetened and salted, then enriched with melted chocolate thinned with hot water. Yolks go in off the heat, whites are folded in last. That is a standard flour-thickened soufflé base; the original proportions are lost with the ingredient column, so no ratio can be given.
- Moderate ovenThe book gives no degrees; "moderate" in this period is usually read as somewhere around 350-375°F. Twenty to thirty minutes at that heat should give a soufflé set at the edges and softer at the centre.
- The chocolateLowney's meant unsweetened baking chocolate, sold in cakes and squares. Modern unsweetened baking chocolate is the direct equivalent; cocoa powder is not, since it lacks the cocoa butter that carries the richness here.
- Cool before the yolksThe instruction to cool the chocolate base is the hinge. Yolks stirred into a hot panade scramble, and the flecks never disperse. Let it come down to warm, no hotter than you can hold a finger in.
- Folding"Cut and fold" is exactly what it sounds like — a spatula down through the centre, along the bottom, up the side, turning the bowl. Slacken the base with a spoonful of the whites first so the rest folds in without deflating.
- Serve immediatelyNot politeness but physics: the thing falls within a few minutes of leaving the oven. Have the sauce and the plates ready before it comes out.
- YieldThree eggs suggests a soufflé for three or four; the recipe says only "a buttered baking dish", so a dish of roughly a quart to a quart and a half is a guess rather than the book's instruction.
Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company, the Boston chocolate manufacturer, and belongs to the great wave of manufacturer-sponsored cookbooks that ran from the 1890s through the 1920s — books that were genuinely useful kitchen manuals and also, quietly, advertisements for a single brand of chocolate, cornstarch or baking powder. The dessert here is the American domestic-science reading of the French soufflé: a flour-thickened base rather than a pastry-cream one, an oven temperature described in words rather than degrees, and a recipe written in the compressed telegraphic style Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking School had made standard. The suggested accompaniments — plain sugar and cream, whipped cream, or a butter-and-sugar hard sauce — are New England habits rather than Parisian ones.