Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Orange Souffle
Orange Souffle
Mix one tablespoonful of flour smoothly with one pint of cream, add two tablespoonfuls of rosewater and put it over the fire in a saucepan with a little thinly-pared orange peel and a little cinnamon; stir till it boils, and remove. Strain and add sufficient powdered white sugar to sweeten it. Let it stand till cold and then mix with it two tablespoonfuls of marmalade and six eggs beaten well with a wineglassful of brandy. Pour it onto a well-buttered mould, stand it in a saucepan of boiling water, and let it boil for an hour and a quarter without any cover over it.
Despite the name, this is a steamed orange custard rather than a risen soufflé — the eggs go in whole and unbeaten as whites, so expect a dense, sliceable pudding turned out of its mould. The one thing to get right is the water bath: keep it at a bare simmer, not the rolling boil the text calls for.
- WineglassfulIn American cookbooks of this period a wineglass is about 2 fluid ounces (¼ cup). That is a lot of brandy against six eggs; half will still read clearly.
- RosewaterRose water strengths vary a great deal between brands, and a modern bottle may read much stronger than the two tablespoonfuls here suggest. Start with one teaspoon and taste the infused cream before straining.
- "Let it boil for an hour and a quarter"A hard boil will curdle an egg custard and pit the surface. Hold the water at 180-190F, and start checking at 45 minutes: the pudding is done when a knife inserted at the centre comes out clean and the mixture no longer wobbles as a liquid.
- Uncovered mouldThe text says to leave the mould uncovered, though it gives no reason. Cover the saucepan itself loosely, or put the mould on a folded cloth in a covered pan of water in a 325F oven, which is easier to regulate than a stovetop bain-marie.
- Cool the base fullyThe cream must be genuinely cold before the eggs and brandy go in, or the eggs will scramble in streaks. Chilling it also lets you skim the skin that forms on the thickened cream.
- MarmaladeUse a bitter Seville-type marmalade; the sweet jelly-style kinds add sugar without the orange edge the recipe is built on. Chop any thick peel small so it suspends rather than sinking.
- Sugar"Sufficient to sweeten" with a pint of cream and marmalade added later works out at roughly ⅓ to ½ cup of superfine sugar. Sweeten the hot cream so it dissolves, then taste cold, when it will read less sweet.
- YieldA pint of cream and six eggs fills a 1½-quart mould and serves six to eight. Butter it heavily and dust with sugar if you intend to unmould.
The name reflects an older and looser use of soufflé, which in nineteenth-century English-language cookbooks was applied to a range of light egg puddings and did not always carry the strictly risen whipped-white sense the word now implies. The flavour profile here — cream infused with pared orange peel and cinnamon, sweetened, then perfumed with rosewater and brandy — belongs to the English tradition of boiled and baked creams that runs back through the eighteenth-century "orange cream" and "orange fool." Rosewater in particular is a survival from medieval and early modern European cookery, where it was a standard sweet flavouring long before vanilla extract became cheap and widespread; by the later nineteenth century it already read as inherited rather than fashionable. Steaming the custard in a buttered mould set in water, instead of baking it in a dish, was a common way to get a pudding firm enough to turn out whole onto a platter — a presentation that mattered in a formal dining room.