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Chocolate Souffle
Place three tablespoons grated chocolate in a bowl with one and a half ounces fine sugar, half teaspoon vanilla essence and yolk of two eggs. Sharply mix five minutes, then beat the whites of five eggs to a stiff froth, add to yolks and gently mix with skimmer one minute. Pour the preparation into a souffle dish, then set in a moderate oven twenty minutes. Remove, sprinkle a little powdered sugar over and immediately send to table.
A flourless soufflé of the old French pattern: no butter, no milk, no cooked base, just chocolate, sugar, yolks and a great deal of egg white. It rises high and collapses fast, so have everyone seated before it leaves the oven.
- The hinge: fold, do not stirOne minute of gentle folding with a flat skimmer or spatula is all the mixture will tolerate. Because there is no flour or starch to stabilise it, the whipped whites are the entire structure; overworked, the souffle will rise poorly if at all.
- Moderate ovenConventionally read as around 350F, though the book states no temperature. Twenty minutes at that heat in a buttered dish of roughly a quart should give set edges and a soft centre.
- Weights and measuresThree tablespoons grated chocolate is roughly three-quarters to one ounce (20-30 g), depending how coarsely it is grated; an ounce and a half of fine sugar is about 3 tablespoons. "Fine sugar" here is most likely caster or ordinary granulated rather than powdered.
- The chocolate"Grated chocolate" in this period could mean either a barely sweetened block or a sweetened cake chocolate. Finely grated unsweetened or 70% chocolate works. Since it is not melted before mixing, the yolk paste may be gritty unless the chocolate is grated to a genuine powder or warmed briefly with the yolks over hot water.
- Two yolks, five whitesThe disproportion may well be deliberate, the high ratio of white lifting a batter with no flour in it, though a printer's error cannot be ruled out. Breaking five eggs leaves three yolks over for custard or mayonnaise.
- Prepare the dishThe original assumes knowledge it does not state: butter the soufflé dish and dust it with sugar, and fill it no more than three-quarters full so the rise has somewhere to go.
- Beating the yolks"Sharply mix five minutes" means by hand. Two to three minutes with an electric mixer on medium brings the yolks and sugar to the same pale, thickened state.
- Yield and servingServes two or three. The recipe has the sugar dusted on in the kitchen immediately before it goes out; carry it straight from the oven, as it begins to sink within a few minutes.
The souffle in this form belongs to the nineteenth-century French repertoire that English and American cookbooks absorbed wholesale, and the word means simply "blown" or "puffed" -- the past participle of souffler. Two kinds circulated: the heavier sort built on a flour-and-milk panade, and this lighter kind, related to the omelette soufflee, which relies on egg white alone. The clipped, workmanlike phrasing here -- "send to table" -- and the direction to fold with a skimmer, a perforated utensil, may point to a professional rather than a domestic hand, though the wording alone cannot settle it.