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INDIVIDUAL (Make the preceding pineapple)
Make the preceding pineapple souffle mixture in all respects as directed, and bake in deep tin gem pans or dariole moulds well buttered, Bake ten or fifteen minutes, keep hot, light and spongy as possible without drying them. Take out with a small knife and dish up in saucers with cream sauce. There need be nothing wasted. The two foregoing compositions and the one to follow all make nice cream pies if diluted with a pint of milk, or with a quart of milk and 2 eggs.
This is a variation rather than a standalone formula: it takes the pineapple soufflé and bakes it in small moulds. A few of Whitehead's assumptions need translating.
- You need the preceding recipeNothing here tells you the proportions. Find the pineapple soufflé mixture immediately above it in the book and make that in full; this page only changes the vessel, the baking time and the service.
- Dariole moulds and gem pansA dariole mould is a small straight-sided metal cup, on the order of 3 to 5 fl oz. "Deep tin gem pans" are the gem or muffin pans of the period; Whitehead specifies tin, and the capacity is similar. Ordinary metal dariole moulds, popover cups or a deep muffin tin all work; butter them thoroughly, as the recipe directs, since the mixture climbs the sides.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given, and the book uses no oven-heat language here at all. Small souffles of this type generally want a fairly brisk oven -- something in the region of 400F -- if they are to set and rise within the ten to fifteen minutes stated; too slow an oven risks the drying out he warns against.
- The hinge: do not overbake"Light and spongy as possible without drying them" is the whole instruction. The margin between properly set and dry is narrow. Pull them when the centre still trembles slightly.
- "Keep hot"Whitehead says keep them hot, but a baked souffle mixture slackens as it stands, so the window is short. Have the sauce and the saucers ready before the moulds come out of the oven.
- Cream sauceIn a dessert context of this date this most likely means a sweet pouring sauce: either a thin custard of milk, egg yolks, sugar and flavouring, or simply sweetened flavoured cream, served in the saucer under the turned-out souffle. It is not a savoury bechamel. The book does not specify the composition here.
- The cream pie noteHe is telling you the same base, thinned with a pint of milk (or a quart of milk plus two eggs), becomes a cream-pie filling. It reads as a note on using up mixture rather than a second recipe.
- YieldDepends entirely on the parent recipe, which is not reproduced here. Fill the moulds about three-quarters full and count them as you go.
Jessup Whitehead wrote for the working American hotel and restaurant cook of the 1880s and 1890s, and this entry shows the mindset: one base mixture put to several uses, and a closing line on how to use up what is left. Individual soufflés baked in dariole moulds were a French restaurant convention, and a dish that could be fired to order and turned out into a saucer with custard suited a la carte service far better than one large soufflé carried from the range to the dining room. Pineapple appears repeatedly in late nineteenth-century American pastry books as a fashionable, faintly luxurious flavour. The phrase "there need be nothing wasted" is the honest heart of the book: Whitehead assumed his reader was cooking to a food cost, not for pleasure.