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Strawberry or Apple Souffle
993. Stew the apples with a little lemon-peel, sweeten them, then lay them pretty high round the inside of a dish; make a custard of the yolks of two eggs, a little cinnamon, sugar, and milk. Let it thicken over a slow fire, but not boil. When ready, pour it in the inside of the apple. Beat the whites of the eggs to a strong froth, and cover the whole. Throw over it a good deal of pounded sugar, and brown it of a fine brown. Any fruit made of a proper consistence does for the walls. Strawberries when ripe are delicious.
A dish of three parts assembled cold and finished under heat: a wall of stiff stewed fruit, a soft custard poured into the well, and a meringue browned on top. The recipe gives no quantities beyond two eggs, so the scale is set by your dish.
- The hinge: fruit stiff enough to standThe apple must be cooked down until it holds a shape when banked up the side of the dish, closer to a thick marmalade than a sauce. Wet fruit slumps and the custard runs under it.
- Strawberries need helpRipe strawberries carry far more water than stewed apple. Cook them down hard with sugar, or fold the pulp into a little reduced apple, or the walls will not stand.
- Custard temperatureTwo yolks with milk and sugar thicken at about 175F/80C and scramble not far above. Cook over a low flame or a water bath, stirring, and pull it off the moment it coats the spoon.
- Pounded sugarThis is sugar crushed fine in a mortar, equivalent to caster or superfine sugar today. Icing sugar browns too fast and tastes of starch.
- BrowningPeriod cooks used a salamander, a heated iron plate held over the surface. A grill/broiler on high for one to two minutes, watched constantly, or a very hot oven at 450F/230C for three or four minutes, gives the same fine brown.
- The meringue stays softA quick browning sets only the surface; the interior of the whites remains barely warm. If you are serving anyone who should avoid undercooked egg, use pasteurised whites.
- Not a baked souffleNothing rises here, so do not expect the dish to puff and do not treat the browning as a bake. The word in the title most likely refers to the frothed white covering rather than to any risen structure.
- Scale and servingThe recipe gives no quantities beyond two eggs, so the dish sets the scale; two yolks make only a modest amount of custard, and two whites a modest lid. Serve within a few minutes of browning, while the custard is still warm.
By the mid-nineteenth century the word souffle appears to have been used fairly loosely, sometimes for dishes finished with whipped egg white rather than only for the risen baked pudding that later claimed the term; here it seems to name the meringue lid rather than the structure of the dish. The dish belongs to the same family as the eighteenth-century trifles and "whips" in which a bank of stewed fruit held a pool of soft custard under a snow of beaten whites. Apples suit the job because they cook to a stiff, pectin-rich pulp that will hold a wall, and the author's aside that strawberries are delicious when ripe points to a short domestic season. Browning of this kind was often done with a salamander, a common fitting in well-equipped kitchens of the period, which may be why many receipts of the time call for a fine brown top without mentioning an oven.