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Cheese Souffle (Grate half a pound of Gruyere)
Grate half a pound of Gruyere cheese. Mix in a cup of milk a dessertspoonful of flour; beat four whole eggs, and add first the cheese, and then the flour and milk mixture. Season with pepper and salt, and put all into a mold. Let it cook in a saucepan of boiling water for an hour and a half. Then at the end of this time put it in the oven for half an hour.
This is a steamed cheese pudding rather than the airy oven soufflé the name suggests today: the eggs go in whole, nothing is whipped, and the mould sits in water for most of the cooking. Expect a dense, sliceable custard with a browned top.
- The hinge: keep the water below a rolling boilAn egg-and-cheese mixture held at a hard boil for an hour and a half will curdle and weep. Keep the water at a bare simmer and cover the mould with buttered paper or foil so condensation does not drip onto the surface.
- DessertspoonfulA dessertspoon is between a teaspoon and a tablespoon, roughly two teaspoons. That is a very small amount of flour for a cup of milk, and it is meant only to steady the custard, not to thicken it.
- Half a pound of GruyereAbout 225 g, which grates up to roughly 2 cups. Use a genuine aged Gruyère or Comté; pre-shredded cheese carries anti-caking starch that will make the texture grainy.
- The mouldA plain charlotte mould or any straight-sided metal or ceramic form of about 1 litre, buttered well. Stand it on a folded cloth or trivet in the pan so the base is not in direct contact with the metal, and keep the water halfway up the sides, topping up with boiling water as it evaporates.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A moderate oven, around 350°F/175°C, will suit the final half hour; the purpose is only to colour and puff the top, since the interior is already set. Watch it, as the cheese browns quickly.
- Total time is not a misprint, but it is generousTotal time is generous -- A mould of this size may well be set through before the full ninety minutes. Test with a skewer: if it comes out clean, move it to the oven rather than steaming on and risking a rubbery, separated custard.
- Turning outLet it stand five minutes off the heat before unmoulding, or serve it from the dish. Salt lightly — Gruyère at this proportion brings plenty of its own.
- YieldFour as a light main course with bread and a salad, six as a first course.
The Belgian Cook Book was assembled by Mrs. Brian Luck in 1915 from recipes contributed by Belgian refugees who had fled to England after the German invasion, and its interest lies partly in that displacement: these are dishes recalled from memory, often in shorthand. That may help explain the missing oven temperature and the vagueness about mould size. The dish itself belongs to an older and broader European family of steamed cheese puddings, cooked in a water bath for gentle, even heat. Whipped-white soufflés of the lighter modern kind were long established in professional cookery by 1915, and sturdier moulded versions like this one persisted alongside them in home kitchens. Gruyère, though Swiss, was widely used as a cooking cheese in northern France and Belgium for preparations of this sort.