No. 3107

Saxony Pudding—Souffled

Pouding Souffle a la Saxonne

Sift half a pound of flour into a saucepan and dissolve it with half a pint of boiling milk, into which has been infused half a vanilla bean; mix with this four ounces of butter and four ounces of sugar; set the saucepan on the fire and stir the mixture with a spatula until it detaches from the saucepan. Then remove it from the fire and beat in four ounces of butter and four ounces of vanilla sugar; continue to stir until it attains body, and let it lose its greatest heat, then add at once ten egg-yolks, four ounces of candied fruits cut in quarter-inch dice, and six stiffly beaten egg-whites; pour this preparation into a dome-shaped mold with a tube in the center, and cook it in a bain-marie in a slack oven for forty-five minutes. As soon as done unmold the pudding on a dish, cover it over with a little apricot marmalade (No. 3675), and serve with a separate apricot sauce with noyau (No. 3100).

← No. 3106 Rice Pudding, Fruit Sauce Hot Entremets — Puddings, Fritters & Soufflés No. 3108 Scotch Pudding →

For the Modern Kitchen

A soufflé pudding built on a cooked flour-and-milk panade rather than a pastry cream, which is what lets it be unmolded and sauced instead of rushed to the table. It is closer in handling to a steamed pudding than to a true soufflé.

The doubled butter and sugarThe text calls for four ounces of butter and four of sugar twice, once into the hot panade and once after it comes off the fire. Ranhofer's method does enrich in stages, but as printed the totals are ambiguous; treat it as 8 oz butter and 8 oz sugar total to half a pound of flour, added in two additions, and expect a very rich batter.
UnitsHalf a pound of flour is about 1 3/4 cups; half a pint of milk is 1 cup. Four ounces of butter is one stick, four ounces of sugar a scant 2/3 cup.
Slack ovenA slack or slow oven is usually read as somewhere around 275-325F. In a water bath at that temperature the 45 minutes given is plausible for a mold of about two quarts; test with a skewer at the thickest point and give it longer rather than raising the heat.
The moldA dome-shaped mold with a central tube, i.e. a turban-type tube mold; the recipe gives no capacity, so judge it by the volume of your batter. The tube lets heat reach the center so the middle sets before the outside overcooks. A plain bowl will not behave the same way.
Bain-marieSet the buttered mold in a roasting pan and pour in boiling water to come halfway up the sides. Keep the water below a simmer; a rolling bath will curdle the custardy edge.
Egg ratioTen yolks to only six whites: the yolks carry the richness and the whites supply the lift. Eggs of the period are generally thought to have run smaller than a modern large; erring toward the smaller end of what you have is a reasonable precaution.
Candied fruitToss the quarter-inch dice in a little of the flour before folding them in, or they sink. If your glace fruit is syrupy, rinse and dry it first.
Vanilla sugar and noyauVanilla sugar is simply sugar stored with a split bean; make it a week ahead or scrape in seeds. Noyau is a stone-fruit-kernel liqueur, close to creme de noyaux; an almond liqueur such as amaretto is one possible substitute.
Unmolding and yieldLet the pudding rest 8-10 minutes out of the bath before turning it out, or the center tears. On these quantities it should serve roughly 8 to 10, and the apricot sauce is not optional dressing -- the pudding is built to be sauced.

A Little History

This comes from Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the enormous compendium of the Delmonico's kitchen in New York, where puddings and soufflés occupy a whole numbered department of the hot entremets. Pouding soufflé was a distinct nineteenth-century French category: a panade or thick pastry-cream base, enriched with butter, yolks and beaten whites, baked in a mold in a water bath so it could be turned out and sauced — sturdier than the airy restaurant soufflé that later took over the name. Dishes labelled à la saxonne, Saxon or Saxony, are often said to point to a German taste for candied fruit and kirsch-and-kernel flavourings in baked puddings, though how closely the label tracked actual Saxon cookery is uncertain. The noyau in the sauce, a liqueur traditionally made by steeping fruit kernels, was a standard confectioner's flavour of the period and explains the almond note running under the apricot.