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Cheese Souffle (Take two good soup-spoonfuls)
Take two good soup-spoonfuls of flour, and mix it with half a teacupful of milk; melt a lump of butter, the size of a filbert, and add that, then enough grated cheese to your taste, and the yolks of four eggs. Add at the last the whites of the four eggs, beaten stiffly; pepper and salt. Butter a mold, put in your mixture, and let it cook for one hour in a saucepan, surrounded with boiling water, and the lid on. Then turn out the souffle, and serve with a mushroom sauce. The sauce is a good white sauce, to which you add already cooked mushrooms. Clean them first of all, chop them, and cook them till tender in butter; and their own juice; then throw them into the sauce, and pour it over your souffle.
This is a steamed soufflé, closer to a savoury pudding than the puffed oven version, and it is meant to be unmoulded whole. The measurements are household rather than exact, so a little judgement is needed before you start.
- The hinge: cook the flour firstAs written, flour, cold milk and a little butter go in raw, which gives a pasty base. Make a thick roux-based sauce instead: melt the butter, stir in the flour, cook a minute, then whisk in the milk and cook until it pulls away from the pan. Cool it slightly before the yolks go in.
- Soup-spoonfulA soup-spoon in this period is roughly a modern tablespoon, so about 2 tablespoons (roughly 15 g) of flour in all.
- Half a teacupful of milkA teacup runs 5-6 fl oz, so this is about 1/3 cup (80 ml). With four eggs the batter is very thick by design; it has to hold its shape when turned out.
- Butter the size of a filbertA filbert is a hazelnut. That is about 2 teaspoons, which is too little to cook 2 tablespoons of flour properly; use 20 g (1 1/2 tablespoons) so the roux comes together.
- CheeseThe recipe leaves the cheese open. A firm cheese that melts cleanly, such as Gruyere or an aged Gouda, would suit; around 3 oz (85 g) matches this quantity of base, and anything very fatty or young will weep.
- The mould and the water bathButter a 1-pint mould or pudding basin, fill it no more than three-quarters, and cover it. Stand it in a saucepan with boiling water reaching halfway up, lid on, and keep the water at a bare simmer so it does not slop over the rim.
- TimingAn hour is generous for this volume. Start testing at 40 minutes: it is done when the centre is set and a skewer comes out clean. Overcooked, it turns rubbery and shrinks from the mould.
- Turning outLet it stand 5 minutes off the heat before inverting, or the still-soft centre will collapse. It will not be airy like an oven soufflé; expect the texture of a light savoury custard.
- The mushroom sauceCook the chopped mushrooms in butter until their liquid has released and largely evaporated, then fold them into a standard white sauce (roughly 1 tablespoon each butter and flour to 1 cup milk). Adding them wet thins the sauce.
- YieldServes three as a light lunch dish, or four as a first course.
The Belgian Cook Book was compiled in 1915 by Mrs. Brian Luck from recipes given by Belgian refugees who had fled to Britain after the German invasion, and sold in aid of relief funds; many of the recipes are written in loose household terms rather than weights. A steamed cheese soufflé of this kind belongs to a long continental tradition of cooking puddings in a covered mould set in simmering water, a method that needed only a saucepan and a fire and made no demands on an oven that many kitchens either lacked or could not regulate. The pairing with a mushroom-flecked white sauce is standard bourgeois cooking of the period, a way of lifting plain egg and cheese dishes into something worth serving at table.