Home › Recipes › Individual or Souffles
Individual or Souffles
1 pound of sugar. 1/2 pint of water, (a cupful.) 4 ounces of butter. 1 pound of almonds. 12 eggs. 2 tablespoonfuls of rose water. A few bitter almonds, or peach kernels.
Pound the almonds--after scalding and peeling them--in a mortar a few at a time till all are reduced to a paste at least as fine as farina. Moisten as you proceed with the rose water to prevent oiling. Boil the sugar and water a few minutes to form a strong syrup. Throw in the butter, then the almond paste, then six yolks of eggs and stir till it cooks thick--about five minutes. Take it off, add the six remaining yolks raw and beat up well. Then the twelve whites whipped firm. Bake in cups or cases. Two ounces of starch added to the syrup along with the almond paste will make taller puddings when souffles are wanted.
Every one thus far has been a week-day pudding, that is to say, a hot pudding. Now a few are needed of another class. It does not seem to be quite well enough known that fashion has decreed it to be vulgar to eat hot pudding on Sunday, except at a railroad eating house, and it is vulgar even there when the pudding is very hot and there is only ten minutes for dinner. The railroad companies do their part to guard the public against getting into such a predicament by running few or no trains on Sundays. The various journals of civilization never mention this new decree of fashion in their articles on table manners for the obvious reason that they cater only to the intellectual wants of first-class people who are already thoroughly informed. It would be very awkward for those journals to go about advising people not to eat hot pudding on Sunday who never do. It may be a little absurd to mention such a thing, but the cooks, and particularly those employed in hotels, are quite glad that hot Sabbath pudding is no longer countenanced by the best people. The change lets them out a little, and the result has not been, as some imagined, an overcrowding of the churches; many of those released professing to be well enough pleased with Strauss and Chopin, Verdi and Beeth oven in a so-called beer-garden. Some talk about Whittier's broader faith and Bryant's idea of the woods being God's first temples, and Byron's pleasure in the pathless woods and rapture on the lonely shore, or something of the sort. At any rate it is said they do better and morecareful work and show more natural energy and less pernicious stimulation after the rest afforded through the abolition of hot Sabbath pudding. What, then, shall there be no more pudding after church? Yes, certainly there shall be puddings plenty and of the most delicate and delicious descriptions but they are not good unless quite cold.
This is a baked almond pudding batter of the kind hotel pastry cooks turned out by the dozen, but it is built on an ingredient that is no longer sold as food in the United States, and for good reason.
- Bitter almonds and peach kernelsBoth contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the nuts are crushed and moistened — exactly what pounding them in a mortar with rose water does. Unprocessed bitter almonds cannot legally be sold as food in the US, and peach, apricot and cherry kernels are in the same chemical family.
- Why "a few" is the problemThe recipe gives no count and no weight for the kernels. Toxicity depends entirely on how many go in and how finely they are ground, and the recipe specifies neither a baking time nor an oven heat, so nothing here can be relied on to drive off the cyanide. A quantity written as "a few" is not a quantity you can assess.
- Scale makes it worseThis is a large batch — a pound of sugar, a pound of almonds, twelve eggs — divided into individual cups. Any kernel flavouring distributes unevenly across the portions, so one diner can receive a far larger share than the average suggests.
- The bitter-almond flavour todayCommercial almond extract supplies the same aroma compound, benzaldehyde, without the cyanogenic glycoside. If you want to bake something in this style, work from a current recipe for an almond soufflé pudding rather than adapting these proportions.
- Reading the measuresFor reference: the author's half pint of water is the cupful he notes in the parenthesis. "Cases" most likely means paper or metal ramekin-sized moulds rather than pastry shells, and the unspecified "starch" is probably cornstarch or potato starch, added, as he says, to make taller puddings.
- The digression is not instructionEverything after the sentence about adding two ounces of starch is Whitehead editorialising about Sunday puddings and hotel cooks' hours. No part of it applies to this formula.
Jessup Whitehead was a working hotel and railroad-dining-car cook who wrote for the trade, and The American Pastry Cook reads like it: brisk professional ratios interrupted by long, dry jokes aimed at fellow cooks rather than housewives. Ground almonds moistened with rose water to keep them from oiling is a very old European confectioner's technique, and the pinch of bitter almond or peach kernel was a common nineteenth-century way to sharpen a bland sweet-almond paste. The riff on the vulgarity of hot Sunday pudding is Whitehead's own; it is tempting to read it as a glimpse of the six-day-a-week pastry shift, and of how welcome any excuse for a cold dessert was, rather than as evidence of any actual decree of fashion.