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Chestnut Pudding Souffle
Make the preceding pudding with only six of the yolks and no whites. Stir it over the fire till it thickens. Take it off and add four raw yolks and when nearly cold all the whites beaten firm, and 1/4 pint of brandy. Bake in a two-quart mould about half an hour. Dredge vanilla flavored sugar over the top in the oven, and send it straight from oven to table. Powdered vanilla bean will flavor the sugar.
Very often in the dinner bills of European plan hotels there appears in pudding's place "Savarin Cake." Persons unaware of all our singular ways would be apt to think there was no pudding. In hotels where the cake is set on the table in baskets Savarin cake as pudding is pretty sure to get lost in the confusion. In United States parlance Savarin cake is Savarin pudding as follows:
Savarin pudding is a hot cake, yeast raised but like sponge cake, with a liquor poured into it, and may be served with sweetened cream. My meal-colored el<??> downstairs, the muscular one who sits on the dough trough lid to keep the dough from raising it, says it takes German bakers and cooks to know how to make fine yeast-raised cakes, that American cooks and bakers are content to get along with pound and sponge cakes for every occasion. In a proposed book of breads yet to come we will have a course of yeast raised cakes beginning with the simplest and including Savarin. However, the common and satisfactory way is to use a good hot sponge or savoy cake for this pudding. Here are both ways.
This is a variation instruction rather than a standalone recipe: it modifies the chestnut pudding printed immediately before it, and the second half of the entry drifts off into a note on Savarin. Read the preceding pudding first, then apply the changes below.
- It depends on the previous recipeEverything here is an amendment to the chestnut pudding printed above. Without that base, this text gives you no quantities of chestnut, sugar or dairy at all.
- The egg arithmeticMake the base custard with six yolks only, cook it until it coats the spoon, then beat in four more raw yolks off the heat. The whites go in last, whipped firm, folded when the mixture is nearly cold — hot custard will deflate them.
- A quarter pint of brandyHalf a cup by US measure. That is a substantial amount of liquid for a soufflé mixture. The recipe adds it after the beaten whites; folding it in before them is a modern precaution, not what the text says.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given anywhere in the entry. A moderate oven is the usual modern reading for a baked pudding soufflé, and half an hour is plausible for a two-quart mould.
- The mouldA two-quart mould means a plain charlotte or soufflé dish of about 2 quarts, buttered and sugared. Fill it no more than three-quarters, since the mixture climbs.
- Vanilla sugarThe book's own method — powdered vanilla bean worked into sugar — still works: split a dried pod, grind it with granulated sugar and sieve. Dredge it over the top in the last minutes so it glazes rather than burns.
- Straight from oven to tableThis is the hinge. A pudding soufflé holds its rise for a few minutes only; have the table waiting for the dish, not the reverse.
- YieldNo yield is stated; a two-quart mould would plausibly serve six to eight as a dessert course.
- The Savarin digressionThe text after the baking instruction is commentary, not part of the recipe. It closes by promising 'both ways' — a Savarin and a sponge or savoy cake version — which follow this passage rather than appearing in it, and it also defers a fuller course of yeast-raised cakes to a proposed book of breads not yet written.
Chestnut purée was a standard of nineteenth-century professional pastry work, arriving in the kitchen either as fresh nuts boiled and sieved or, later, as imported tinned French purée, and it turned up in Nesselrode puddings, croquettes, and soufflés like this one. The Savarin the author wanders into is a yeast-raised ring cake soaked in syrup and spirits, generally traced to the Parisian pastry trade of the 1840s and named for the gastronomic writer Brillat-Savarin; it is a close relative of the older baba. The complaint that only German bakers could be trusted with fine yeast-raised cakes, and that American bakers stopped at pound and sponge, comes from a hotel-kitchen milieu of the 1880s and 1890s, where cooks worked the American and European plan dining rooms, and it is as much shop-floor grumbling as instruction.