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Vanilla Souffle
Beat together the yolks of three eggs and one teacupful each of flour and sugar. When well incorporated stir in gradually one pint of fresh milk, and strain it through a fine hair-sieve into a saucepan. Put about one ounce of butter, a piece of stick of vanilla, and a little salt in with the other ingredients, and stir them over a very slow fire until thick; then move it to the side and continue stirring for a few minutes longer. Remove the vanilla from the mixture, allow it to cool a little, then mix with it the beaten yolks of five eggs, and a small lump of butter, and last of all the well-whisked whites of half a dozen eggs. Make some small paper cases in the shape of a long square, butter them and nearly fill them with the mixture, which should be sufficient in quantity to fill eight cases. Place the souffles in a slow oven, and bake them for eighteen minutes. Serve the moment they are done.
This is a flour-thickened soufflé — essentially a pastry cream lightened with whipped whites — which is sturdier and more forgiving than the custard-only kind. The measurements are loose in the nineteenth-century manner, so a little judgment is needed before you start.
- The hinge: temper, then foldThe cooked base must be cooled to just warm before the five extra yolks go in, or they will scramble in it. The whisked whites go in last and fast, in two additions, folded rather than stirred; once the whites are broken down the soufflé will not climb.
- "One teacupful"A Victorian teacupful is variously reckoned at anywhere from 4 to 6 fl oz, so the quantity is genuinely uncertain. Equal teacupfuls of flour and sugar by volume is a lot of flour for a pint of milk. Weighing gives a steadier base; bear in mind that 6 fl oz of flour weighs only about 3 oz, so scooping and weighing are not interchangeable here.
- Egg countRead the recipe as written: three yolks in the base, five more yolks after cooking, and six whites. That is eight yolks and six whites in total, so you will have whites left over. Save them.
- "A piece of stick of vanilla"A two-inch length of vanilla bean, split, infused in the milk mixture and fished out before the yolks go in. A teaspoon of extract stirred in off the heat is the modern substitute, though it lacks the seeds.
- Hair sieveA fine horsehair sieve was widely used for straining, and was often preferred on the grounds that it left no metallic taste. Any fine-mesh strainer does the same job; the point is to catch flour lumps before the mixture ever sees heat.
- "A slow oven"A slow oven is around 300F. Eighteen minutes at 300F will not set small soufflés reliably in a modern oven; 375F for 15-18 minutes suits buttered ramekins of this size better. Bake on a preheated sheet and do not open the door for the first ten minutes.
- Paper casesThe recipe calls for small buttered paper cases folded into a long rectangle. Six-ounce ramekins, buttered and dusted with sugar, are simpler and give the mixture something to grip as it rises.
- Yield and serviceEight small soufflés. "Serve the moment they are done" is not flourish — the interior steam that lifts them starts escaping within a minute or two of leaving the oven.
A soufflé built on a flour-and-milk panade rather than pure custard behaves differently from one built on custard alone, and can be part-prepared in advance. Oscar Tschirky, who ran the Waldorf's dining rooms from the 1890s and lent his name to this collection, was maître d'hôtel rather than chef, and the book reads like the house repertoire written down — French technique in American measures, with teacupfuls and "slow ovens" standing in for the gram scales and thermometers a French brigade manual would have used. The individual paper case, buttered and filled just short of the rim, was often used for small entremets; the ramekin largely replaced it in the twentieth century.