No. 3114

Pudding with Hazel-Nuts—Souffled

Pouding Souffle aux Noisettes

Dilute in a saucepan seven or eight spoonfuls of rice fecula with four to six gills of hazel-nut milk, prepared the same as almond milk (No. 4); add to it a grain of salt and a piece of butter; thicken the preparation over the fire, stirring it about with a spoon; after it attains the consistency of a souffle preparation remove and add to it a quarter of a pound of vanilla sugar (No. 3165) and a quarter of a pound of butter, then ten egg-yolks, one whole egg, two spoonfuls of whipped cream and four egg-whites beaten to a stiff froth. Butter a timbale mold, fill it with the preparation laid in alternate layers with slices of biscuit cut very thin, cover over with some apricot marmalade (No. 3675), and when the mold is full set it in a saucepan containing hot water to reach to half its height, then poach for three-quarters of an hour in a bain-marie. At last moment unmold it on a dish and cover with English cream with almonds and vanilla (No. 42), serving more of the sauce (No. 3004) separately.

← No. 3113 Pudding with Burnt Almonds—Souffled Hot Entremets — Puddings, Fritters & Soufflés No. 3115 Rice with Apples →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer writes for a professional brigade with a numbered cross-reference for every component, so the page assumes you already have hazelnut milk, vanilla sugar, apricot marmalade and a vanilla-almond crème anglaise on hand. Read it as a steamed soufflé pudding rather than a true soufflé: it is poached in a water bath and unmolded, so it will not collapse the way an oven soufflé does.

The hinge: it is poached, not bakedThe mold sits in a saucepan of hot water to half its height. Keep the water hot but below a boil; Ranhofer gives no temperature, and a boiling bath risks curdling the custard at the mold wall so the pudding weeps when turned out.
Gills and spoonfulsA gill is half a cup, so four to six gills is 2 to 3 cups of hazelnut milk. The "spoonfuls" are genuinely ambiguous in Ranhofer — read them as generous tablespoons, and judge by consistency: the starch base should be a thick, spoon-coating paste before anything else goes in.
Rice feculaThis is rice starch, not rice flour. Cornstarch is the closest common substitute and behaves similarly; rice flour will give a grainier, heavier body.
Hazelnut milkHis No. 4 is nuts pounded to a paste with water and strained through cloth. Commercial hazelnut beverages are thin and often sweetened and gummed; blanched hazelnuts blitzed with water and strained through a jelly bag give the fat and body the recipe is counting on.
"A grain of salt"A pinch, nothing more. It is there to sharpen the nut flavor, not to season.
Vanilla sugarRanhofer's No. 3165 is sugar pounded and sifted with vanilla beans. A quarter pound is about half a cup plus a spoonful; superfine sugar left a week in a jar with a split bean does the same job.
BiscuitNot a cracker or a scone. This is biscuit in the French sense — thin slices of dry sponge cake or ladyfinger, layered in to absorb moisture and give the pudding structure.
EggsTen yolks, one whole egg and four whites makes a very rich batter. Egg sizes were far less standardized in the 1890s than they are now, so if the batter looks loose before folding, hold back a yolk or two.
Timing and yieldTiming -- Three-quarters of an hour is Ranhofer's figure; he gives neither a mold size nor a yield, so scale the time to whatever timbale you use. Test with a skewer at the center, which should come out clean and hot, and let it rest a few minutes before unmolding.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York for over thirty years, and The Epicurean (1894) is essentially that restaurant's working system set down in print — some 3,500 numbered items that refer to one another like a parts catalogue, which is why this pudding can call for five separate preparations by number without repeating a word of them. Soufflé puddings poached in a bain-marie were a staple of the nineteenth-century entremets course precisely because they held: unlike an oven soufflé, which had to be run to the table, a molded pudding could sit a few minutes while the dining room was served. Nut milks like the hazelnut milk here descend from a much older European kitchen tradition — almond milk was a medieval and Renaissance mainstay, useful on fast days and before reliable dairy — and by Ranhofer's day they appear to have survived largely as a flavoring device in fine pastry work rather than as a substitute for cream.