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Nut Soufflé
1 cup soft bread crumbs 1/2 cup milk 1/2 cup chopped nuts 1/2 teaspoon salt Dash of pepper Whites of 3 eggs Put the milk and bread crumbs over the fire; cook until perfectly smooth, stirring constantly. Remove from the fire; work in the nuts; add the seasoning; fold in the well-beaten whites of eggs; turn into a baking dish and bake in a quick oven from ten to fifteen minutes. Serve at once. 1 cup milk
A whites-only soufflé built on a bread panade rather than a butter-and-flour roux — cheap, quick, and structurally fragile. The whole dish depends on how the whites go in.
- Fold, do not stirThe panade should be warm but not hot when the whites go in, or they will deflate and weep. Stir in about a quarter of the whites to loosen the paste first, then fold the rest through in two additions, stopping while a few streaks remain.
- A quick oven is 425–450°FA quick oven -- Period sources place this somewhere in the 400-450F range. That is hot for a souffle, but the ten to fifteen minutes given is short. Use a buttered dish of about a quart and check at ten minutes; the centre should be just set and trembling.
- The stray "1 cup milk"The line at the end appears to be a printing artefact or a fragment carried over from an adjacent recipe, not a second addition. Use the half cup listed at the top; a full cup gives a batter too loose to rise.
- Soft bread crumbsThis means fresh crumbs torn or grated from a day-old loaf, not dry packaged crumbs. Dry crumbs absorb far more liquid and will give you paste rather than a smooth panade — if that is all you have, use about half the quantity.
- Cooking the panadeMilk and crumbs over low heat, stirring constantly, until perfectly smooth and thick, as the recipe directs - a couple of minutes. Any scorching on the bottom will flavour the whole dish, since there is nothing else in it.
- The nutsWalnuts, pecans or almonds all work; chop them fine, as large pieces cut through the foam and drag it down. Toasting them first for a few minutes adds the depth this otherwise very plain mixture lacks.
- SeasoningHalf a teaspoon of salt for the whole dish is modest given there is no yolk, cheese or stock. Taste the panade before the whites go in — that is the last chance to adjust.
- Yield and timingThe recipe gives no yield; three whites and a cup of crumbs will stretch to about two small servings, or three or four as a side. It falls within minutes of leaving the oven, so have everything else on the table first.
Meat-substitute chapters were standard in American cookbooks of the 1910s and 1920s, driven partly by wartime and postwar conservation campaigns and partly by a long-running domestic-science interest in protein economy - nuts and eggs standing in for a chop. The technique here is an old one: a panade of bread and milk is the classic binding base for quenelles in French cookery, and bread-based panades were used for souffle mixtures alongside flour-thickened ones. It survived in household books partly because it needs no butter and no roux. Using only the whites produces a lighter, drier result than a whole-egg souffle; the yolks could be held back for a custard or a sauce.