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Coffee Souffle
(I) In a sugar boiler put one-half pound of green coffee, roast without browning it, and soak in it one quart of boiling milk for about an hour. Stir one breakfast cupful of flour, one teaspoonful of vanilla-sugar and caster-sugar and one teaspoonful of salt, together with the prepared milk; pour it into a saucepan and stir it over the fire until boiling. Remove the mixture from the fire, put in the yolks of six eggs with the whites beaten very firm, fill some paper cases with the mixture, and bake. When done, sprinkle caster-sugar over the top, and serve immediately. (2) Put into a stewpan one pint each of milk and cream, add a little sugar and salt, and let it boil. Roast one-fourth pound of raw coffee and throw it while hot into the boiling cream, and finish the same as for No. I.
Two versions of the same dish: a coffee-infused flour panade lightened with egg, baked in paper cases. The instructions assume a cook who already knows how a soufflé behaves, so the useful work is in the omissions.
- The hinge: roast, don't brownGreen coffee heated "without browning" is warmed only until fragrant and releasing its oils — it is an aromatic infusion, not brewed coffee. Let the beans take real colour and the milk will taste of roasted coffee rather than the lighter perfume the instruction seems to want.
- Green coffee is still availableUnroasted beans are sold by home-roasting suppliers. If you cannot get them, infusing the milk with coarsely cracked lightly roasted beans is the nearest equivalent; instant coffee gives a different, flatter flavour.
- Strain the milkNeither version says so, but the whole beans must be lifted or strained out after the hour's steeping. Expect to lose some liquid to absorption and evaporation — top the quart back up if it has dropped much, or the batter will be stiff.
- Sugar boiler and stewpanA sugar boiler is an unlined heavy copper pan, used here simply because it takes direct dry heat well. Any heavy skillet or saucepan does the job. "Stewpan" likewise means a plain saucepan.
- Breakfast cupfulAt least a standard 8 oz cup, and possibly larger. With a quart of milk that gives a thick, spoonable panade — stir constantly as it comes to the boil or it will catch and lump.
- The sugar and salt are unreliable as written"One teaspoonful of vanilla-sugar and caster-sugar" is ambiguous and, on any reading, far too little sugar for a quart of dessert base; the figure cannot be taken literally. One teaspoonful of salt is also high — start with a quarter teaspoon. Sweeten the strained milk before thickening and taste it.
- EggsBeat the yolks into the base while it is hot enough to cook them but off the heat, then fold in the firmly whipped whites in two or three additions. Do not slacken the whites by stirring.
- Cases and ovenButtered and sugared paper soufflé cases, ramekins or a single buttered dish all work. No temperature is given: 375F suits small cases, about 15 to 20 minutes until risen and just set, longer for one large dish. Sprinkle with caster sugar and carry them straight to the table — they fall within minutes.
- YieldA quart of base with six eggs makes a large quantity: expect eight or more individual cases.
- Version 2Half cream in place of some of the milk, and the hot beans thrown directly into the boiling liquid rather than steeped off the heat. It is richer and slightly more strongly flavoured; otherwise proceed identically.
Oscar Tschirky's The Cook Book (1896) records the working repertoire of a large hotel kitchen at the moment when the French dessert soufflé had become an expected item on American hotel menus, and its coffee versions were built on infusion rather than brewed coffee — beans steeped whole in hot dairy, a method that gives aroma without the acidity or the muddy colour of liquid coffee. Roasting one's own green coffee, normal in American households for most of the nineteenth century though already in decline by the 1890s as packaged pre-roasted coffee spread, is what makes the instruction "roast without browning" sensible here: the cook already had raw beans on hand and could arrest them at whatever stage the dish wanted. The paper cases are the period's standard soufflé vessel, and the terse "and bake" with no temperature is typical of the book, which was written for cooks working coal ranges they knew by hand and eye rather than by dial.