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Hot Puddings
2 tablespoons butter 2 tablespoons flour 3/4 cup milk Chocolate Soufflé 1/3 cup sugar 2 tablespoons hot water 3 eggs 1½ squares unsweetened chocolate 1/2 teaspoon vanilla Melt the butter, add flour, and pour on gradually, while stirring constantly, milk; cook until boiling-point is reached. Melt chocolate in a small saucepan placed over hot water, add sugar and water, and stir until smooth. Combine mixtures, and add yolks of eggs well beaten; cool. Fold in whites of eggs beaten stiff, and add vanilla. Turn into a buttered baking-dish, and bake in a moderate oven twentyfive minutes. Serve with Cream Sauce I. 3 tablespoons butter Mocha Soufflé 3 tablespoons bread flour ¾ cup boiled coffee (Mocha) 1/4 cup cream 1/2 cup sugar 1/4 teaspoon salt 4 eggs ½ teaspoon vanilla Make and bake same as Chocolate Soufflé. Serve with Mocha Sauce. Mix yolks two eggs, one-fourth cup sugar, and a few grains salt; then add gradually one-half cup Mocha coffee infusion. Cook in double boiler until mixture thickens, stirring constantly. Strain, cool, and fold in one cup whipped cream.
Fruit Soufflé ¾ cup fruit pulp, peach, apricot, or quince Few grains salt Whites 3 eggs
These are true hot soufflés built on a thick white sauce base, not on custard, and they are all one method: a stiff panada, flavouring, yolks, then whipped whites. A few figures have gone astray in the printed ingredient lists, so read the method first and assemble accordingly.
- The missing baseBoth souffles begin with the same roux-and-milk panada, but the chocolate list has lost its flour and milk, and a stray "3 tablespoons butter" floats between the two recipes, so it is unclear which list it belongs to. The mocha list gives 3 tablespoons bread flour with 3/4 cup coffee and 1/4 cup cream as its liquid. For the chocolate version the milk quantity has to be supplied by the cook; about 3/4 cup is a reasonable match to the flour.
- "34 cup" means three-quartersWherever the text prints 34 cup, read 3/4 cup. The same applies to the fruit pulp in the unfinished third recipe.
- Moderate ovenThe book gives no temperature; "moderate" in period usage is generally read as somewhere around 350-375F. Twenty-five minutes suits a shallow buttered baking dish; a deeper dish will need longer, and the centre should still be slightly loose.
- Bread flour, deliberatelyBread flour -- The book's "bread flour" is ordinary strong white flour, the standard flour of the period, as distinct from cake or pastry flour. All-purpose flour works; cake flour gives a slacker base.
- Unsweetened chocolate squaresA square is 1 ounce, so 1 1/2 squares is 1 1/2 oz of unsweetened baking chocolate. Cocoa is not a substitute here without recalculating the fat.
- Cool the base before the whitesThe instruction to cool after adding the yolks is the hinge. Fold stiff whites into a hot panada and they deflate and partly cook; the base should be barely warm to the touch.
- Mocha means coffee"Boiled coffee (Mocha)" is simply strong brewed coffee, named for the Yemeni port that once supplied the beans. Use 3/4 cup of strong coffee, and note the sauce calls for a further 1/2 cup infusion.
- Serve at onceA souffle begins to fall within a few minutes of leaving the oven, so have the cream or mocha sauce ready beforehand.
- Mocha sauceThe sauce paragraph runs on from the soufflé without its own heading: yolks of two eggs, 1/4 cup sugar, salt, 1/2 cup coffee infusion, thickened in a double boiler, strained, cooled, then folded into a cup of whipped cream.
These hot souffles belong to the era when American cooking schools were teaching French method to middle-class households, and the panada base is the giveaway: it is the classic souffle au chocolat of the professional kitchen, scaled to a family baking dish and paired with the sweet cream sauces the book uses in its pudding chapter. The label "Mocha" for anything coffee-flavoured was standard in turn-of-the-century American cookbooks; it descends from the Red Sea port of Mocha, long a shipping point for Arabian coffee, and had come to be used as a generic flavour name. The fruit souffle that follows is made with whites alone and 3/4 cup of fruit pulp -- peach, apricot or quince.