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Pineapple Puddings Souffles
2 pounds of pineapple. 1 pound of sugar. 2 ounces of best butter. 1/2 pint, scant, of the pineapple juice. 2 ounces of corn starch. 16 eggs. Grate the pineapple if fresh, if canned mash fine as possible adding the sugar at last to assist in reducing it to pulp. Then stir the pulp with the sugar and butter in it over the fire. Mix the starch with the juice and add to the fruit, and let it thicken, after which add 8 yolks of eggs, beat them in and let all cook 5 to 10 minutes longer, and then set the mixture away to cool. Then beat the remaining 8 yolks in a bowl with a Dover egg beater. Whip the 16 whites to a firm froth that will not fall out of the bowl upside down, and stir in first the yolks and then the whites, lightly and without beating the mixture at all. Bake as soon as made in about 40 custard cups, buttered, or in silver scallops or shells, or else in paper cases. Ten minutes in a moderate oven is the time required to bake. Dredge powdered sugar on top before removing quite from the oven.
The preceding receipt will answer as well for several other varieties as if a column or two of repetitions were written. Pears, quinces, apples, bananas, perhaps other dry fruits may be used as well as pineapple. The starch is to counteract the juiciness; with certain mealy kinds of apples it would not be needed. Bread or cracker crumbs have the same effect. 8 yolks are cooked in the mixture and 8 well beaten are added raw. The whites must be beaten quite firm, and a wire whisk is the best to use for that purpose. The mixture when finished is as light and foamy as sponge cake batter. It rises and bakes cream color in the cups or cases. Paper cases should be buttered inside and half baked before being filled, and should be filled to the top to look well when done. Carefully wipe the outsides of cups before baking. These little fruit puff puddings may be liked better with the addition of plain, thick cream for sauce. Some people would add nutmeg or cinnamon or brandy to the composition of apple puffs. Any of these mixtures left over will do to fill tarts in patty pans. These are no better than other puddings. They are all good.
A hotel-scale soufflé pudding written for a pastry department: the yield is forty cups, and the proportions assume you are working with a mixing bowl the size of a bucket. Everything divides cleanly by eight if you want a household batch.
- Scale it downDivide by four for ten cups: 8 oz pineapple, 4 oz sugar, 1/2 oz butter, 1/4 cup juice, 1/2 oz cornstarch, 4 eggs (2 yolks cooked in, 2 raw, 4 whites).
- Weights to volumes2 oz cornstarch is about 1/2 cup, 1 lb sugar about 2 1/4 cups, 2 oz butter 4 tablespoons. A "scant half pint" of juice is a touch under one cup.
- Moderate oven350F. Ten minutes is right for small custard cups; the puddings should be set at the edge, still trembling at the centre, and cream-coloured rather than browned.
- The hinge: fold, do not stirThe instruction "lightly and without beating the mixture at all" is the whole recipe. The base must be genuinely cool before the raw yolks and whites go in, and the whites should be folded in two or three additions with a spatula. Anything more vigorous and the puddings bake dense.
- Fresh pineapple and eggsFresh pineapple contains bromelain, a protein-digesting enzyme that can interfere with an egg mixture setting. Here the pulp and juice are both cooked before any egg is added, which deactivates it — do not shortcut by folding raw fresh pineapple or its juice into the finished mixture.
- Dover egg beaterA hand-crank rotary beater, the standard American kitchen tool of the period. Any whisk or electric beater does the job; the author's own note that a wire whisk is best for the whites still holds if you want maximum volume.
- Paper casesModern equivalents are paper soufflé cases or doubled muffin liners in a tin. The instruction to half-bake them empty first is to set the paper so it does not slump; buttered ramekins are simpler and behave better.
- Serve at onceSouffle puddings like these sink soon after leaving the oven, though the cornstarch in the base makes them steadier than a classic souffle. Dredge with powdered sugar in the last moment of baking as directed, and send them straight to the table with the thick cream the author suggests.
The American Pastry Cook belongs to the run of late-nineteenth-century American trade manuals written by and for hotel and restaurant cooks rather than housekeepers — hence the batch of forty cups, the reference to silver scallops, and the frank aside that these puddings "are no better than other puddings." The dish itself is a fruit soufflé pudding, a cheaper hotel cousin of the French soufflé aux fruits: fruit pulp thickened with starch, enriched with cooked yolks, then lightened with a great many whites. Pineapple appears here in both fresh and canned form, and the recipe accommodates the two in the same breath, which shows only that both were obtainable to its readers. The refusal to write out "a column or two of repetitions" for pears, quinces, apples and bananas is characteristic of the professional manuals, which assumed a reader who understood a formula and could vary it — the note that starch can be dropped for mealy apples, or replaced with bread or cracker crumbs, is the sort of working knowledge these books existed to pass along.