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Chocolate Soufflé
1 cup scalded milk
1 tablespoon fat
3 tablespoons flour
⅓ cup sugar
2 ounces grated chocolate
3 eggs
Make a sauce of the milk, flour, chocolate, fat and sugar. Stir in the egg yolks, and fold in the beaten egg-whites. Proceed as in Prune Soufflé.
A panade-based soufflé of the sort that filled the pudding chapters of household manuals: a thick flour-and-milk sauce enriched with yolks and lightened with whipped whites. The recipe assumes you have already read the prune version a few lines above, so the actual baking is left unstated.
- The missing instructions"Proceed as in Prune Soufflé" points back to the recipe printed a few lines earlier, which is not reproduced here; the baking directions have to be taken from it. Soufflés of this type were commonly turned into a buttered dish, often stood in a pan of hot water, and baked in a moderate oven until set and puffed. The recipe itself states neither temperature nor time.
- "Fat"The unspecified "fat" would have covered butter, lard, drippings or vegetable shortening, the choice left to the cook. Use butter here; one tablespoon is a small amount for three tablespoons of flour, so the roux will be dry and stiff rather than smooth.
- The chocolateGrated chocolate in recipes of this period generally means unsweetened baking chocolate, which is consistent with half a cup of sugar going in with it. Substituting semisweet or a modern 70% bar will make the soufflé noticeably sweeter and softer; if you do, cut the sugar to about a third of a cup.
- Building the baseCook the flour with the fat, then add the scalded milk, sugar and chocolate and stir until thickened. The recipe calls it a sauce, and three tablespoons of flour to a cup of milk gives a thick sauce rather than a stiff paste; it needs enough body to carry the whites.
- Adding the yolksLet the base cool to warm before the yolks go in, or they will scramble in streaks. Beat them in one at a time and work quickly; the mixture stiffens as it cools.
- The whitesBeat to soft, not stiff, peaks. Stir a quarter of them into the base to slacken it, then fold in the rest in two additions. Overbeaten whites break up under folding and the soufflé rises unevenly.
- Yield and servingThree eggs and a cup of milk make about four servings. Soufflés of this type begin to sink within a few minutes of leaving the oven, so bring it straight to the table. A thin cream or vanilla sauce was a common accompaniment.
Soufflés built on a flour panade rather than pure custard were the domestic-science version of a restaurant dish -- cheaper, sturdier, and more forgiving of an unreliable coal or early gas range. Butterick, a pattern company that expanded into household advice for the same audience that bought its dress patterns, published this collection around the close of the First World War, a period when butter was expensive and recipe writers often left the choice of shortening open. The chain of cross-references ("proceed as in Prune Soufflé") is also characteristic of the era's cookbooks, where one master method was expected to carry a whole family of desserts.