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Semolina Souffle
Boil up two pints of milk and fifteen lumps of sugar with a bit of vanilla. Add three soup-spoonfuls of semolina, and let it boil for fifteen minutes, while you stir it. Take it from the fire, and add to it the yolks of two eggs and their whites that you have beaten stiffly. Put it in the oven for a quarter of an hour, and serve it hot.
A soft milk-pudding soufflé of the plain Continental sort, written in the shorthand of a cook who did not expect to be asked for grams. Two things need pinning down: the sugar count and the oven, neither of which the original states in modern terms.
- Fifteen lumps of sugarLump sizes varied, but a period lump is often reckoned at about a teaspoon, which would make this roughly 5 tablespoons or somewhere near 60 g. Sweeten to taste rather than counting: the mixture should taste slightly sweeter than you want the finished dish, since heat mutes it.
- Soup-spoonfulsA soup-spoon in Belgian and French usage is the tablespoon. Three tablespoons of semolina to two pints (1 litre) of milk gives a very loose, pourable pudding — closer to a baked cream than a soufflé. If you want it to hold any height, six to eight tablespoons is nearer modern practice.
- SemolinaCoarse durum wheat semolina, sold as such or as semolina flour; the finer Italian semola rimacinata will also cook down, though it gives a smoother result. Do not substitute semolina pudding mixes or couscous.
- The vanilla"A bit of vanilla" most likely means a piece of vanilla pod steeped in the hot milk, then fished out before baking, though vanilla sugar or essence cannot be ruled out. A split half-pod is plenty for a litre; a teaspoon of extract stirred in off the heat is the substitute.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. Use 375F (190C) for a fifteen-minute bake in a buttered dish — hot enough to set and colour the top without collapsing the whites. It will rise modestly and sink as it cools, which is expected.
- Cooling before the eggsLet the cooked semolina stand a few minutes before the yolks go in, or they will scramble in threads. Stir the yolks in first, then fold the stiff whites through in two additions, keeping as much air as the loose base will hold.
- Stirring the semolinaThe recipe asks for a full fifteen minutes of stirring. Semolina catches and scorches on the bottom of the pan, so constant stirring matters, though the grains themselves swell and lose their raw, chalky bite well before the time is up.
- Yield and servingTwo pints of milk makes enough for six. It must go to the table straight from the oven; served cold it is simply semolina pudding, which is a different and denser thing.
The Belgian Cook Book was assembled in 1915 from recipes gathered from Belgian refugees who had fled to England after the German invasion, and its plainness is part of the record: these are the dishes people remembered from ordinary kitchens, not restaurant cooking. Semolina — coarsely milled durum wheat — was the backbone of cheap Continental milk puddings, and dressing one up with beaten whites and a baked top was the standard way to turn nursery food into a dessert fit for company without spending more on it. The vagueness about the oven is characteristic of the period, when cooks judged heat by hand and habit rather than by a dial; recipe writers assumed that knowledge and saw no reason to write it down.