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Souffle au Chocolat
Melt two tablets of chocolate (Menier) in a dessert-spoonful of water over heat, stirring till the chocolate is well wetted and very thick. Then prepare some feculina flour in the following way: Take for five or six persons nearly a pint of milk. Sweeten it well with sugar; take two dessert-spoonfuls of feculina. Boil the sweetened milk, flavoring it with a few drops of vanilla essence. When it is boiled, take it from the fire, and let it get cold, mixing in the flour by adding it slowly so as not to make lumps. Put it back on a brisk fire and stir till it thickens; add then the melted chocolate, and when that is gently stirred in take off your pan, and again let it get cold. At the moment of cooking the souffle, add three whites of eggs beaten stiff. Butter a deep fireproof dish, and pour in the mixture, only filling up half of the dish. Cook in the oven for fifteen minutes in a gentle heat, and serve immediately. A tablet of Chocolat Menier is a recognized weight. A New Dish of Apples Take a pint of apple puree and add to it three well-beaten eggs, a taste of cinnamon if liked, quarter of a pound of melted butter and the same quantity of white powdered sugar. Mix all together and, taking a fireproof dish, put a little water in the bottom of it and then some fine breadcrumbs, sufficient to cover the bottom. Pour in your compote, then, above that, a layer of fine breadcrumbs, and here and there a lump of fresh butter, which will prevent the breadcrumbs from burning. Cook for half-an-hour.
A starch-thickened chocolate base lightened with whipped whites — closer to a baked pudding than a French flour-and-butter souffl√©. Note that the text as printed runs straight into a second, unrelated recipe for baked apple compote; treat them as two dishes.
- The hinge: fold the whites at the last momentThe base can be made hours ahead, but the three beaten whites go in only as the dish is going into the oven, exactly as written. Folded early they deflate and the soufflé bakes into a dense pudding.
- FeculinaA commercial fine starch flour of the period, essentially potato starch (French fécule) or a similar refined cornstarch. Substitute plain cornstarch or potato starch, two dessert-spoons being roughly 2 rounded teaspoons each, so about 4 teaspoons in total.
- Chocolat Menier tabletsMenier bars were scored into tablets of standardised weight, which is why the author says "a recognized weight," but she never gives the figure and it is not safely recoverable. As a working substitution, use about 2 oz (55-60 g) of dark chocolate and adjust sweetening to taste.
- Dessert-spoonBetween a teaspoon and a tablespoon — reckon 2 teaspoons. The single dessert-spoonful of water for melting the chocolate is deliberately small; it is there to make a thick paste, not a sauce.
- Why the milk is cooled twiceStarch slurried into hot milk seizes into lumps, so the milk comes off the heat, the starch is stirred in cold, and the pan goes back on "a brisk fire" to thicken. The second cooling stops the hot base from cooking the egg whites on contact.
- Oven"A gentle heat" is all the book gives; in modern terms a moderate oven, somewhere around 325F (165C), is a reasonable reading. The recipe's fifteen minutes assumes the deep dish it specifies, filled only halfway; judge by a set edge and a still-trembling centre and allow longer if the mixture is deeper.
- Yield and serviceFive or six portions, as stated. It must go to the table straight from the oven — this base sinks quickly.
- The apple dish appendedA pint of apple puree, 3 eggs, and 4 oz each of butter and sugar, baked between breadcrumb layers for half an hour; no oven temperature or dish size is given. The recipe says only to put a little water in the bottom of the dish before the first crumb layer, and credits the lumps of fresh butter on top with keeping those crumbs from burning.
The parenthetical "(Menier)" dates and places this recipe as clearly as anything in the book: Chocolat Menier, milled at Noisiel outside Paris, was a widely sold branded eating and cooking chocolate before the First World War, sold in bars scored into tablets of fixed weight so that cooks could measure by count rather than scale he ttablet "is a recognized weight." The Belgian Cook Book was compiled in Britain in 1915 from recipes gathered from Belgian refugees, and the domestic detail is part of the point: the reliance on a proprietary starch flour and a French brand of chocolate reflects a middle-class Belgian kitchen that shopped from the same commercial pantry as the French one.