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Jamaica Souffles
Puff puddings baked in candied orange rinds.
When oranges are used for jelly, sherbets, etc, save the rinds to form the cups or cases for this purpose. They can be cut as melons are cut, to make ornamental edges, or else the entire peel removed by being slit part way down, can be turned back to form shapes like tiger-lilies. Boil the rinds in several waters till tender, and the butter taste is all extracted; then boil in thick sugar syrup; drain, roll in sugar and set them to dry in the shape required till wanted. 2 pounds of banana pulp. 3/4 pound of best butter (or, olive oil with salt.) 3/4 pound of sugar. 16 eggs, less four whites left out. 1/4 pint of brandy 1/2 teaspoonful of ground mace.
Place the two pounds of mashed banana in a bright saucepan with the butter, sugar, mace and eight yolks of eggs, and stir them over the fire till cooked to a sort of a marmalade, cool it, add the other eight yolks raw, then the brandy and beat thoroughly; then mix in the twelve whites whipped to a firm froth. Bake in the orange cups on a buttered pan, in a slow oven about ten minutes. Powdered sugar flavored with vanilla on top. Serve as soon as done. The rinds if skillfully candied without being made hard are a pleasant confection.
It is difficult to make anything of almonds as good as it ought to be without a marble mortar and pestle to pound them to a paste in. If your house does not own one, a porcelain potato-masher and small deep kettle may have to do for a substitute.
A banana soufflé mixture baked in candied orange shells, written for a hotel pastry department rather than a home kitchen. Two things need attention before you start: the scale, and the oven temperature.
- Scale it downAs written this is roughly 30 to 40 portions: 2 lb banana pulp, 12 oz each butter and sugar, 16 eggs, half a cup of brandy. A quarter batch (8 oz banana, 3 oz butter, 3 oz sugar, 4 eggs with 3 whites, 2 tablespoons brandy) gives about eight filled orange cups.
- The ovenA "slow oven" in this period is usually reckoned somewhere around 300-325F, and a souffle will not rise and set in ten minutes at that heat. Small cases of this kind want 375-400F for 10-12 minutes; treat the original wording as the general caution against scorching the candied rind rather than a usable number.
- The hingeThe whipped whites go in last, folded rather than stirred, and the filled cups go straight into the oven. Any waiting time and the marmalade base deflates them. "Serve as soon as done" is the whole point of the dish.
- "Butter taste" in the rindsAlmost certainly a typesetting error for bitter taste. Boiling the peel through several changes of water draws out the bitterness from the pith; taste a piece before you commit it to syrup.
- Candy the rinds aheadBlanched, syruped, sugared and dried peel keeps for weeks in a tin. Stop the syrup before it thickens to hard-crack stage or the cups turn brittle and crack when filled, which is what the closing note about "without being made hard" is warning against.
- 1/4 pint of brandyHalf a cup in American measure. In a quarter batch, 2 tablespoons; more than that and the base slackens too much to hold the whites.
- The banana marmalade baseBananas, butter, sugar, mace and half the yolks are cooked to a thick paste, then cooled before the remaining raw yolks go in. Cool it properly or the yolks scramble, and use a heavy pan and low heat, since sugared banana pulp catches quickly.
- Olive oil optionThe alternative of "olive oil with salt" suits a cook who needs to avoid butter. It works, though the flavour is noticeably different; a mild oil is better here than a peppery one.
- The almond paragraphThe closing lines about marble mortars and pounding almonds have nothing to do with this dish and appear to belong to some other entry; they can be ignored.
The American Pastry Cook belongs to the run of trade manuals Jessup Whitehead wrote in the 1880s and 1890s for hotel and restaurant kitchens, which is why the quantities read like a banquet order and why the book assumes a marble mortar, a candying pan and a supply of spent orange peel from the sorbet station. The name presumably points to the bananas: they were the Jamaican import of the moment, arriving in American ports in commercial volume from the 1870s onward and cheap enough by the 1890s that a pastry cook could use two pounds of pulp without comment. Baking a sweet mixture in a hollowed and candied citrus shell is much older than the banana trade, and belongs to the same family of tricks as orange baskets and lemon cases in earlier English confectionery books; the decorative cutting described here, melon edges and turned-back "tiger-lily" petals, is the kind of ornamental work such manuals expected, meant to be looked at as much as eaten.