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Custard Souffle
Mix two tablespoonfuls of butter and two tablespoonfuls of flour together; boil half a pint of milk, and add the flour and butter gradually to the boiling milk and stir over the fire for eight minutes; beat with the yolks of four eggs and five tablespoonfuls of caster-sugar, stir in with the milk and the rest of the mixture and let it cool. Beat the whites of the four eggs to a froth, mix them with the cold custard, turn into a buttered pie-dish, and bake for twenty minutes in a moderate oven.
A plain panade-based soufflé, thick enough to be forgiving. The one thing that decides whether it rises is how the whites go in.
- Fold, do not stirThe instruction to "mix" the beaten whites with the cold custard means fold. Lighten the base with a third of the whites first, then fold the rest in with a spatula until barely combined; stirring collapses the foam and gives you a dense baked custard.
- Moderate oven350F. Bake on a middle rack and resist opening the door before the twenty minutes are up.
- Half a pint of milkOne cup. Two tablespoonfuls each of butter and flour to a cup of milk gives a medium-thick sauce, and eight minutes over the fire will reduce and stiffen it further; a stiff, spoon-coating base is what you want for this style.
- Caster-sugarSuperfine sugar. Regular granulated works in the yolk mixture, since it dissolves in the warm custard; five tablespoonfuls is a scant third of a cup.
- The eight minutes matterCooking the flour and butter into the boiling milk for a full eight minutes drives off the raw-flour taste and gelatinizes the starch, which helps the beaten whites hold their volume in the oven. Stir constantly and keep the heat low enough that the bottom does not scorch.
- Beat with the yolks"Beat with the yolks of four eggs and five tablespoonfuls of caster-sugar" means whisk the yolks and sugar together separately, then combine with the hot milk mixture. Add a little of the hot base to the yolks first so they do not scramble.
- Cool before the whitesThe recipe calls for a cold custard, so let the base cool properly; a hot base will slacken the beaten whites. Press plastic wrap onto the surface while it cools to keep a skin from forming.
- Dish and yieldA buttered 1- to 1 1/2-quart pie dish or shallow baker; the mixture should come no more than two-thirds up the side. Serves four, and it must go to the table straight from the oven, as it will sink within a few minutes.
Oscar Tschirky's Cook Book (1896) records the working repertoire of the Waldorf, and this is the hotel kitchen's utility souffle: not the delicate pastry-cream version but the sturdier panade type, built on a butter-and-flour paste cooked into milk, which is essentially a thick bechamel sweetened and leavened with egg white. The starch stabilizes the foam, making such a souffle less likely to fall between the range and the dining room than a flourless one. The name comes from the French souffler, to blow or puff, and the form is generally traced to early nineteenth-century Parisian kitchens, Antonin Careme's among them, before American hotel and household cookery adopted it. Its appearance here alongside more elaborate desserts is a reminder that a hotel of the 1890s needed dishes a large brigade could turn out from milk, flour, butter and eggs at almost any hour.