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Peanut Soufflé
1 tablespoon butter
Few drops lemon-juice
6 tablespoons flour
1½ cups scalded milk
¾ cup peanut butter
4 eggs
1½ teaspoons salt
Melt the butter and add the flour, peanut butter and seasoning. Cook for three minutes, stirring constantly. Add scalded milk, and continue cooking until the mixture reaches the boiling-point. Remove from the fire, pour the hot mixture over the well-beaten egg-yolks, mixing them in well. Cool, and fold in the egg-whites that have been beaten until stiff and dry. When the ingredients are thoroughly combined, place in a baking-dish, set in a pan of water in a moderate oven (350° F.), and bake thirty minutes. Serve immediately.
This dish is a good luncheon dish but, because of its texture, should have something crisp or solid served with it.
A dense, savory soufflé built on a very stiff peanut-butter panade. The proportions are unusual by modern standards, and knowing that in advance will save you a good deal of doubt at the stove.
- The base is meant to be thickSix tablespoons of flour to a cup and a half of milk gives a paste, not a pouring sauce, and the peanut butter thickens it further. It will look wrong; that stiffness is what carries the eggs.
- Peanut butter has changedIn this period peanut butter was essentially ground roasted peanuts, sometimes with salt, and without the added sugar, palm oil or emulsifier of modern commercial brands. Use a natural unsweetened grind and stir it well; a sweetened commercial brand will push the dish toward dessert and the 1½ teaspoons of salt will taste odd against it.
- "Stiff and dry" is period phrasingWhites beaten literally dry are overbeaten and will break into curds when folded. Take them to firm peaks that still look glossy and fold in a third first to slacken the base, then the rest.
- Temper carefullyThe recipe pours the hot mixture over the yolks, not the reverse. It does not say to do so gradually, but the base is thick enough to hold real heat, so adding it a little at a time is safer than dumping it in at once.
- Cool before foldingThe instruction to cool is not optional. Warm base deflates the whites on contact and the soufflé will bake flat.
- Dish and water bathThe recipe calls only for a baking-dish set in a pan of water, baked thirty minutes at 350°F. A deep straight-sided dish of roughly 1½ quarts will hold it; a wider, shallower dish will likely cook faster, so check before the full time.
- Yield and accompanimentProbably about four servings as a lunch main, though the recipe gives no yield. The note about serving something crisp with it is the recipe's own — the texture is soft throughout, and toast points, celery, or a sharp green salad do the work.
- Serve immediatelyLike any soufflé it begins falling within a couple of minutes of leaving the oven. Have the table sitting before it comes out.
Peanut butter reached American tables in the 1890s, promoted through sanitariums and health-food circles as an easily digested protein, and by the 1910s it appeared regularly in vegetarian and "meatless" cookery. Recipes like this one treat it as a savory ingredient rather than a sandwich spread — an unremarkable use at the time, when peanut butter also turned up in soups, croquettes and loaves intended to stand in for meat at luncheon. The soufflé itself is standard French technique, a thick flour-and-milk base enriched with yolks and lightened with whites, and its appearance here shows a new American ingredient fitted into an established European form.