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Chocolate Souffles
Put one and two-thirds of a cupful of milk in a double boiler, put on the fire and boil. Take a third of a cupful of milk, add two tablespoonfuls of cornstarch, and put it to the boiling milk. Dissolve an ounce and a half of chocolate and one teacupful of sugar with two tablespoonfuls of boiling water, and also add this to the milk. Beat the yolks of three eggs, add half a saltspoonful of salt, put this to the mixture. Put the boiler in ice water and beat until cold. Flavor with vanilla and pour into a dish. Beat the whites of the eggs to a stiff froth, put in half a cupful more sugar, and heap it on the mixture in the dish.
Despite the name, nothing here is baked and nothing rises: this is a cornstarch-thickened chocolate custard, chilled and crowned with meringue. Read it as a cold pudding and it makes sense.
- The hinge: the yolks need heatAs written the yolks go into the hot mixture and the pot goes straight into ice water, which leaves them barely warmed and the custard thin. Whisk a little of the hot milk into the yolks first, return everything to the double boiler, and cook to about 170F until it coats a spoon before chilling.
- The meringue is rawBeaten whites with sugar heaped on a cold pudding are never cooked in this recipe. Either brown the topping briefly in a 400F oven or under a broiler, or build a cooked Italian meringue with hot sugar syrup.
- Teacupful of sugarA nineteenth-century teacupful was usually reckoned smaller than a modern measuring cup, though usage varied and the amount is genuinely imprecise; something in the region of 3/4 cup is a reasonable reading for the custard. The further half cupful beaten into the whites appears to be an ordinary cup measure.
- SaltspoonfulA saltspoon is about 1/4 teaspoon, so half a saltspoonful is a scant 1/8 teaspoon.
- The chocolateAn ounce and a half means unsweetened block baking chocolate, which is why so much sugar follows. Cocoa powder is not a substitute here without rebalancing the fat and the sugar.
- CornstarchMixing the two tablespoons into the reserved third cup of cold milk is the point of that step: added dry to boiling milk it lumps immediately. Once it goes in, cook and stir a few minutes so the starch loses its chalky taste.
- ChillingBeating over ice water is not fussiness; it keeps a skin from forming and gives the pudding a smoother set than simply refrigerating it undisturbed.
- YieldAbout three cups of custard, plus the heaped meringue; four to six servings, whether turned out into one dish as directed or divided among stemmed glasses.
Oscar Tschirky came to the Waldorf as maitre d'hotel when it opened in 1893 and put his name to this collection of hotel-kitchen formulas a few years later; the recipes read as they would have been dictated to a brigade, with quantities and sequence and little explanation. The loose use of "souffle" is of its period, when the word was applied fairly broadly to dishes involving beaten whites, hot or cold, baked or not. Underneath the chocolate this is a cornstarch pudding of the sort that filled American dessert courses after boxed cornstarch became a common pantry item in the second half of the nineteenth century, a cheaper and steadier thickener than the isinglass and arrowroot of earlier blancmanges.