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Cheese Soufflé
1 cup cheese
4 tablespoons butter, or other fat
3 eggs
1 cup milk
½ teaspoon salt
4 tablespoons flour
Pepper
Make a white sauce of milk, flour, fat and seasonings. Add the cheese and beaten egg-yolks and stir until the cheese has melted and the yolks are set. Fold in stiffly beaten egg-whites. Pour into a buttered dish, or buttered individual molds, and set in a pan of hot water. Bake fifteen minutes in a slow oven (300° F.), or until the egg-white is set, and serve at once. It begins to fall as soon as removed from oven.
The cheese soufflé may be baked in ramekin dishes and served as a cheese course for dinner.
A thick béchamel base with three eggs, baked in a water bath — closer to a baked custard than the tall, dry soufflé of later cookbooks. The hinge is heat control when the yolks go in.
- Do not scramble the yolksPull the sauce off the heat before adding the beaten yolks, then return it to low heat only briefly. "Stir until the yolks are set" means thickened, not cooked into curds; if it looks grainy the texture is gone and no amount of folding will bring it back.
- A cup of cheeseGrated, loosely packed, roughly 3 to 4 ounces. A sharp cheddar or a dry aged cheese carries the dish; mild supermarket cheddar disappears into the sauce. Grate it fine so it melts before the base overheats.
- "Other fat"Drippings or other rendered fats were common stand-ins for butter in cookbooks of this period. Use butter. Four tablespoons of fat to four of flour with one cup of milk gives a very thick white sauce, which is what holds the whipped whites up.
- Slow oven, 300°FThe book gives the number itself, and the low heat suits a water bath: it keeps the custard from puffing violently and weeping.
- Fifteen minutes is for ramekinsFifteen minutes -- The recipe gives fifteen minutes for either a single dish or individual molds, with "or until the egg-white is set" as the real test. Small molds will set in about that time; a single dish holding the whole quantity will need noticeably longer, and is done when the center is just barely firm and no longer sloshes.
- The water bathHot, not boiling, and coming about halfway up the molds. Boiling water in the pan will make the edges soufflé aggressively while the middle stays loose.
- FoldingThe recipe calls for stiffly beaten whites; beaten dry they tend to break into lumps when folded into a base this thick, so soft-to-medium peaks are easier to work in. Slacken the base with a spoonful of white first, then fold in the rest.
- Yield and timingServes three or four as a light main course, or fills several small ramekins as the cheese course the note describes. Have people seated before it comes out; the recipe says it begins to fall as soon as it leaves the oven.
Soufflés reached American household cookbooks through French professional cooking of the nineteenth century, and by the early twentieth century they had settled into this form: a flour-and-butter white sauce, a flavoring, and beaten whites, described in much the same way whether the flavoring was cheese, chocolate or leftover fish. The Butterick book was published by a pattern company, for a readership of home sewers and housekeepers. The note about serving it in ramekins as a cheese course reflects an older dinner sequence, in which a hot cheese dish could arrive as its own course; that hot savoury course is particularly associated with English and Anglo-American formal dining.