Essence Anchovy
5 "hard-boiled" eggs 1 cup cooked macaroni 1/2 cup grated cheese 1¾ cups White Sauce I Salt and paprika Onion juice ¾ cup buttered crumbs Cut eggs in eighths lengthwise, add macaroni, white sauce, and seasonings. Arrange in buttered baking dish, cover with buttered crumbs, and bake until crumbs are brown. 2 tablespoons butter 2 tablespoons flour 1 cup milk Egg Soufflé 1 cup cream 4 eggs 1 teaspoon salt Few grains cayenne Cream the butter, add flour, and pour on gradually scalded milk and cream. Cook in double boiler five minutes, and add yolks of eggs, beaten until thick and lemon-colored. Remove from fire, add seasonings, and fold in whites of eggs beaten until stiff and dry. Turn into a buttered dish, or buttered individual moulds, set in pan of hot water, and bake in a slow oven until firm. Egg Soufflé may be served with White Sauce I, highly seasoned with celery salt, paprika, and onion juice.
The soufflé here is a baked custard base lightened with beaten whites and set in a water bath, which makes it far more forgiving than a classic risen soufflé. The whole thing rests on how the whites go in.
- Fold, do not stirThe whites should be beaten stiff and dry, then cut and folded through the warm base in a few broad strokes. Once the mixture is smooth and slack you have lost the air, and it will bake into a plain custard.
- Slow ovenRead that as 300-325F. The water bath plus low heat is what keeps the eggs from curdling; a hotter oven will puff the top and then leave you with a weeping, grainy interior.
- Firm means just setTest at about 35-45 minutes for one large dish, 20-25 for individual moulds. The centre should barely tremble and a knife inserted off-centre should come out clean. Baked past that point the custard tightens and squeezes out liquid.
- Water bath depthHot water should come halfway up the dishes, and the pan should go into the oven with the water already hot. A folded towel or a rack under the moulds stops the bottoms from overcooking.
- "Cream the butter, add flour"This is simply a roux made without heating the butter first. Work the flour in smoothly, then add the scalded milk and cream gradually so no lumps form before it goes into the double boiler.
- CreamHeavy cream works well here. Cream in books of this period was not standardised and could be thinner or richer than today's heavy cream, but heavy cream gives the richness the recipe assumes and behaves predictably.
- YieldFour eggs and two cups of liquid (one milk, one cream) make a modest dish, roughly four servings or a half-dozen small individual moulds. It is a supper dish rather than a dessert, and the recipe offers the seasoned white sauce as an optional accompaniment.
- Onion juiceCalled for in the accompanying sauce, this is the liquid pressed from a grated onion. A quarter teaspoon is plenty; substitute a small pinch of onion powder if you would rather not grate.
Egg souffles like this one belong to a period when cookery schools taught white sauce as a foundation technique: master the butter-flour-milk ratio and it could be turned into a cream soup, a croquette binder, a gratin, or, with yolks and beaten whites, a souffle. Eggs were a relatively inexpensive protein on the American middle-class table, and books of this type give them considerable space as the centre of a meal rather than a breakfast side. The water bath and the slow oven were common insurance against curdling in coal and wood ranges whose temperature could not be dialled in, and the instruction to beat whites "stiff and dry" reflects the period's move toward describable, teachable standards for steps earlier cookbooks often left unspecified.