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Or Roast Pork
This is a very delicate dish. The ingredients are nine large tart apples; four eggs; one cup of sugar; one tablespoon of butter; cinnamon and other spices to taste. Stew the apples very soft, mash and beat out all the lumps and then add the butter and sugar and then let them cool. Next beat and add the eggs. Bake in a shallow pudding dish or in two pie tins until brown.
OMELET SOUFFLÉ-Take six eggs, three tablespoons of pulverized sugar, one-half teaspoon of orange flower water, vanilla or lemon. Beat the whites of the eggs to a hard froth. Put the yolks of three eggs in a bowl with the sugar and flavoring, and beat them well. Add the whites, mix quickly, and pile the mass as high as possible on a well-buttered baking-dish. Smooth the top of the mound, make a slit down the center and at the sides, and bake fifteen minutes in a moderate oven. At the end of this time the soufflé should be of a fine yellow shade. Sprinkle with powdered sugar and serve at once.
OMELET SOUFFLÉ À LA CRÉOLE-Beat the whites of six eggs to a stiff froth; mix thoroughly with the yolks four dessertspoons of powdered sugar, and the yellow rind of a lemon finely chopped; then mix whites and yolks together, melt one-fourth pound of butter in a pan over a brisk fire and pour in the eggs, and stir so that all may be thoroughly mixed, and then pour it in a buttered dish and set it in the oven. Sprinkle the top with sugar and serve as soon as sufficiently cooked. و
Three related dishes run together on one page: a baked apple custard and two sweet omelet soufflés. The page heading is an artifact of the original book's running heads and has nothing to do with what follows.
- Oven temperature"A moderate oven" in a book of this vintage is usually taken as somewhere around 350-375F. The Créole version gives no temperature or time at all; a similar heat is a reasonable assumption, and "as soon as sufficiently cooked" means when the mass is puffed, set at the edges and still slightly loose at the center.
- The apple dishNine large tart apples cooked down and mashed gives roughly a quart of thick purée. Cook the apples dry enough that the mash mounds on a spoon; a watery purée will weep under the eggs and never set. Baking soda is not involved and neither is flour, so this is a baked apple custard rather than a pudding in the English sense.
- Cool before adding eggsThe instruction to let the apples cool before beating in the eggs is the hinge of the first recipe. Beaten into hot purée the eggs scramble on contact and the finished dish goes grainy.
- The three-yolk discrepancyThe Omelet Soufflé calls for six eggs but then directs only three yolks into the bowl. That is as printed. The result is a whites-heavy, meringue-like soufflé; using all six yolks gives a denser, richer, more custardy one. Either works; the airier version is what the printed text gives, whether by design or by misprint.
- DessertspoonA dessertspoon is two teaspoons, so four dessertspoons of powdered sugar is about two tablespoons and two teaspoons — a modest amount of sweetening for six eggs.
- Pulverized sugarPulverized and powdered sugar of the period mean finely ground sugar without the cornstarch of modern confectioners' sugar. Superfine (caster) sugar is the closer match for beating into yolks; use confectioners' for the dusting at the end.
- Orange flower waterStill sold in Middle Eastern groceries and baking aisles, and considerably stronger than most modern extracts. Half a teaspoon in six eggs is right; more turns soapy.
- The quarter pound of butterThe Créole version melts 4 oz of butter in a pan over a brisk fire and pours the eggs into it before transferring to a dish. Keep the heat below browning — the butter is there to enrich and lubricate, not to fry the eggs, which would deflate the whites before they reach the oven.
- Serve immediatelyBoth soufflés fall within a few minutes of leaving the oven, which is why the first says to serve at once and the Créole one to serve as soon as it is sufficiently cooked. Have the table sitting before the dish comes out.
- YieldThe apple dish fills two pie tins and serves six to eight. Each omelet soufflé is made from six eggs and serves three or four as a dessert.
Butterick's cook book belongs to the era when the sweet omelet had a place in American home cookery, the technique being identical to that of the savory kind: eggs, air, a hot dish, immediate service. The soufflé omelet is an older thing than the flour-thickened soufflé that shares its name — no béchamel base, just beaten whites folded with sweetened yolks and set in the oven, a form generally traced to French domestic cookery and carried into English and American books through the nineteenth century. The "à la Créole" designation on the third version reflects the period's interest in New Orleans cookery, recorded in books such as the Picayune's Creole Cook Book; the distinguishing marks here are the generous butter and the chopped lemon rind rather than a bottled flavoring. The apple dish that opens the page is a plainer country relation — an apple sauce bound with eggs and baked — the sort of thing that turned a barrel of fall windfalls into a dessert with nothing more than sugar, butter and the hens' output.