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Cheese Souffle (Ounce cornstarch ounce butter)
1/2 ounce cornstarch 1 ounce butter Pepper and salt, cayenne 1 ounce grated cheese Small pinch bicarbonate soda 1/2 pint of milk Mix the cornstarch with a little cold milk, put the rest on to boil, add the moistened cornstarch and cook a few minutes. Add the pepper, salt, cayenne, butter, soda and cheese. Then bake for fifteen minutes and serve at once.
A very small dish — this is a single generous portion or two side servings — and one that has almost certainly lost a line in printing. Read the notes on the missing eggs before you start.
- The missing eggsAs printed this is a thick cheese panada with no eggs, and nothing in it can rise or set; baked fifteen minutes it will simply be hot sauce. Comparable soufflés of this size are generally built on two or so eggs, the yolks beaten into the cooled sauce and the whites whipped stiff and folded in last. Without that step you have Welsh rarebit filling, not a soufflé.
- Weights to volumesHalf an ounce of cornstarch is roughly 1¾–2 tablespoons; 1 ounce of butter is 2 tablespoons; 1 ounce of grated hard cheese is a scant ¼ cup loosely packed. Half a pint is 1 cup in American measure, 10 fl oz if the book is following British practice — either works, the sauce is simply looser with the larger amount.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given at all; the recipe says only "bake." Fifteen minutes suggests a fairly brisk oven — something in the region of 375–400°F is a reasonable modern guess — in a small buttered dish filled no more than three-quarters.
- The pinch of sodaBicarbonate here is not a leavener in any meaningful amount. It raises the pH of the sauce so the cheese melts smoothly instead of stringing or breaking. Keep it to a genuine pinch; more gives a soapy, slippery taste.
- Cook the starch out"A few minutes" means at least three of gentle bubbling after the slurry goes in, stirring constantly. Cornstarch tastes chalky if pulled early, and the sauce should be thick enough to coat the spoon heavily.
- Cheese off the heatAdd the grated cheese after the pan leaves the burner and stir until it melts in the residual heat. Boiling cheese in a starch sauce is what produces the grainy, oily texture the soda is trying to prevent.
- Serve at onceThe instruction is the only one in the recipe that is non-negotiable for anything soufflé-like. It begins collapsing within a minute or two of leaving the oven.
Books of this kind multiplied in the United States and Britain around the First World War, when meat and other commodities were placed under voluntary conservation programmes and household cooks were urged to find protein elsewhere. Cheese, eggs, beans and nuts were among the substitutes recommended, and a chapter headed "Meat Substitutes" is a fair marker of that literature. The souffl— the name is simply the past participle of souffler, to blow or puff — and by 1900 it had been thoroughly domesticated into English-language cookery as a way of stretching a small quantity of a strong-flavoured ingredient into something that looked like a course.