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RABBIT, &c.
No. 131. Soffiato di Cappone (Fowl Soufflé) Ingredients: Fowl, Béchamel, stock, semolina flour, potatoes, salt, eggs, butter, smoked tongue or ham.
Prepare a purée of fowl or turkey and a small quantity of grated tongue or ham, and whilst you are pounding the meat add some good gravy or stock. Then make a Béchamel sauce (No. 3) and add two table - spoonsful of semolina flour, a boiled potato and salt to taste, boil it up and add the purée of fowl, then let it get nearly cold, add yolks of eggs and the white beaten up into a snow. (For one pint of the purée use the yolks of three eggs.) Pour the whole into a buttered soufflé case, and half an hour before serving put it in a moderate oven and serve hot. You can use game instead of fowl, and serve in little soufflé cases.
A late-Victorian way of turning cooked fowl into something light. The recipe assumes you know how to make a soufflé and gives quantities only for the eggs, so the base panada is where judgement is needed.
- The hinge: get the base rightThe Béchamel-and-semolina mixture must be thick enough to hold a spoon upright before the purée goes in, or the soufflé will not climb. Cook the semolina in the sauce for a good five minutes so it swells fully and loses its raw graininess.
- Semolina flourFine semolina (semolino), not coarse couscous-grade grain and not durum bread flour. It acts as a thickener alongside the boiled potato, which is there as a binder rather than for flavour.
- Pounding the meatA mortar was intended; a food processor does it in seconds. Add the stock in a thin stream while the machine runs, and stop while the purée still has a little texture — over-processed poultry turns pasty and heavy.
- Béchamel No. 3The book's own white sauce, given earlier in the book. A medium-thick Béchamel, roughly a cup to a pint of purée, suits.
- Smoked tongue or hamGrated smoked tongue was an ordinary larder item in 1901 and is now a specialty-butcher purchase. Finely grated prosciutto, speck or a good smoked ham gives the same salty, smoky lift; keep it to a couple of tablespoons so it seasons rather than dominates.
- Egg ratioThree yolks per pint of purée; the recipe counts only the yolks, so read the whites as the same three, beaten stiff. Fold a spoonful of the whites in first to slacken the base, then the rest in two additions, cutting rather than stirring.
- Soufflé case and ovenA "soufflé case" here is a straight-sided dish, buttered — the paper cases of the same name are for the small individual version at the end. A moderate oven is 350F; the large soufflé needs about 30 minutes, the little ones 12 to 15.
- YieldA pint of purée made up as directed will roughly fill a 1.5-quart dish and serve about four as a light main course or six as a first course. It will not wait: bake it to the moment of serving.
The Cook's Decameron (1901) is Mrs W. G. Waters's collection of Italian dishes, hung on a Boccaccio-style frame in which a party of guests tells and cooks its way through ten days. The Italianate title soffiato di cappone — from soffiare, "to blow", hence "puffed" capon — sits over a technique that is French in method, and the reliance on Béchamel reflects how far French method had spread through the professional kitchens of Europe by the turn of the century. The dish belongs to the large family of Victorian and Edwardian entrées that could be built from cooked meat left from a previous meal: a roast fowl or the remains of a turkey, pounded with stock and lightened with eggs. Grated smoked tongue supplied colour and salt to poultry that had already given its best to the roasting pan, as it did in the potted meats and forcemeats of the period.