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Apricot Souffle
This is good enough even for an English "dinner-party." Beat the whites of six eggs stiffly. Take four dessert-spoonfuls of apricot jam, or an equal quantity of those dried apricots that have been soaked and stewed to a puree. It you use jam, you need not add sugar. If you use the dried apricots, add sugar to sweeten. Butter a dish at the bottom, and when you have well mixed with a fork the beaten whites and the apricot, put it in a pyramid on the dish and bake for fifteen minutes in a moderate over. Powder with sugar.
A meringue-style soufflé with no yolks, butter or flour — essentially whipped whites carried by fruit purée. It rises fast, sets lightly and falls almost as quickly, so everything else should be ready before it goes in.
- Moderate ovenSet the oven to 350F (175C) and have it fully heated before the whites are beaten. A dish this loose will weep if it waits on the counter.
- Dessert-spoonfulsA dessertspoon sits between a teaspoon and a tablespoon, about 2 teaspoons or 10 ml. Four of them is a scant 3 tablespoons of jam, which is a modest amount of flavour for six whites; a generous 1/4 cup gives a more pronounced apricot taste.
- Fold, do not mixThe instruction to "well mix with a fork" will deflate the whites if taken literally. Slacken the jam first with a spoonful of the beaten white, then fold the rest in with a spatula in a few broad strokes, leaving some streaking rather than beating it smooth.
- Jam versus dried fruitJam already carries a large proportion of its weight in sugar, which is why none is added. Dried apricots stewed to a puree need sweetening and should also be cooked down thick and cooled — a wet puree will slump the whites.
- Buttered only at the bottomThe recipe greases just the base, and the mixture is heaped free-standing in a pyramid rather than poured into a straight-sided souffle mould, so a shallow gratin dish or pie plate suits it.
- Fifteen minutes and no moreAt 350F the pyramid should be set on the outside, tinged gold, and still soft within. There is no starch or yolk to stabilise it, so it begins collapsing within a minute or two of leaving the oven.
- Sugar at the end"Powder with sugar" means a dusting of fine sugar through a sieve over the baked pyramid.
- YieldSix whites and a few spoonfuls of jam serve four generously, or six as the light end of a full dinner.
The Belgian Cook Book was assembled in 1915 by Mrs. Brian Luck from recipes given by Belgian refugees who had fled to England after the German invasion, and the aside that this dish is "good enough even for an English 'dinner-party'" reads as a displaced cook's dry comment on her hosts' food. The recipe itself is wartime economy dressed as a dessert — six egg whites, a few spoonfuls of preserve, no cream, no butter, no flour, and the option of dried apricots when jam was scarce. Souffle is the past participle of souffler, to blow or puff, and this is the plainer sort: not the bechamel-based souffle of the restaurant kitchen but a baked meringue flavoured with whatever fruit the store cupboard held.