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Souffle of Potatoes with Lemon
994. Roast about ten potatoes; when they are done, open them, and scoop out the floury part, and mix it with half a pint of cream that has boiled, and in which has been infused the peel of a lemon; add some butter, a pinch of salt and a little lump sugar, not too much, lest your soufflé should not be light, but enough to give flavour. Add the yolks of four eggs to the above. Then beat the whites of six eggs, and mix with the rest. Pour it gently into a dish, and bake in a moderate oven. When done, sift a little sugar over it, and brown with the salamander. It should be served up immediately.
A Victorian sweet potato souffl that behaves like any other: the whites do all the work, so fold rather than stir, and get it to the table the moment it leaves the oven.
- Pick the right potato"Floury" here describes the cooked flesh scooped from the roast potatoes; a dry baking potato such as Russet or Maris Piper suits it best, while waxy potatoes give a gluey purée that will not hold air. Ten potatoes may give more flesh than the other quantities need, so any surplus can be set aside for cakes.
- Half a pint of creamAn imperial half pint is 10 fl oz, about 1¼ cups. Warm it with the lemon peel, then let it stand off the heat 10–15 minutes and strain the peel out before mixing.
- Lump sugarLoaf sugar broken into lumps; granulated is the direct substitute. The recipe's own caution stands: it warns that too much sugar will keep the soufflé from rising light, so add only enough to give flavour and lean on the lemon.
- Pass the potatoPush the scooped flesh through a ricer or fine sieve while hot. Anything mashed by hand leaves lumps that puncture the foam as it rises.
- Temperature of the baseLet the potato-and-cream mixture cool to warm before the yolks go in, and to barely tepid before the whites. Hot base plus beaten whites means a deflated batter.
- A moderate oven"Moderate" in mid-Victorian usage is usually read as somewhere around 325–350F. Butter and sugar the dish and fill it no more than three-quarters; the recipe gives no time, so bake until the top is set and the centre still slightly loose.
- The salamanderAn iron plate heated red and held above the surface to glaze it. A broiler set high does the same job in a minute or two; watch it, as the sifted sugar goes from caramel to burnt very quickly.
- Serve at once"Immediately" is not politeness. A soufflé begins to fall within a few minutes of leaving the heat. The recipe gives no yield.
The British Cookery Book, edited by John Henry Walsh and published in 1859, belongs to a period when French technique was well established in wealthy English kitchens; French-trained chefs such as Ude, Soyer and Francatelli ran the great London houses and clubs. A starch-bound soufflé like this one, using potato where a pâtissier would use flour, is the older and sturdier type, and it forgives a cook without a reliable oven better than a pure custard base does. The salamander named at the end was standard equipment long before the gas grill: a thick iron plate on a handle, heated in the fire and passed over the dish to glaze sugar.