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Soufele of Raspberry
Place two gills raspberry jelly in a bowl with two ounces sugar and half teaspoon orange essence. Mix the whole together for five minutes with a wooden spoon, then add the yolks of two eggs; mix again for two minutes more, add five egg whites, beaten up to a stiff froth; gently mix with a skimmer for one minute. Pour the preparation into a souffle dish and set in the oven to bake for twenty minutes. Remove, sprinkle a little powdered sugar over and immediately send to the table.
A jelly soufflé rather than a custard-based one: no flour, no milk, no cooked base. That makes it fast, but it also means the structure comes entirely from the whites, so the folding and the oven are the whole recipe.
- Two gillsA gill is half a cup, so two gills of raspberry jelly is one cup, roughly 10-11 oz by weight. Two ounces of sugar is a scant 1/3 cup.
- What "jelly" means hereA firm, strained, seedless preserve stiff enough to hold its shape when spooned, not a pourable syrup or a modern soft-set freezer jam. If your jelly is loose the soufflé will be slack; beat it smooth first so there are no lumps to break the whites.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives none. A moderate oven, around 375F, is a reasonable modern setting for the twenty minutes stated; much hotter risks the top setting and cracking before the centre does, much cooler and it may not climb well.
- Orange essenceAn alcohol-based flavouring extract. Half a teaspoon of modern orange extract is a fair substitute, though period essences varied in strength; the finely grated zest of half an orange is another option.
- Five whites to two yolksApparently not an error; the extra whites would help lift a heavy fruit base. That leaves three spare yolks to use for something else.
- The hinge: one minute of folding"Gently mix with a skimmer for one minute" is the instruction that decides the dish. A skimmer is a flat perforated spoon; a large rubber spatula does the same job. Stop while streaks of white are still visible rather than folding to a uniform pink.
- The dishA 1 1/2-quart straight-sided soufflé dish, buttered and dusted with sugar so the mixture can grip and rise. Fill to about three-quarters and do not open the oven during baking.
- Serving"Immediately send to the table" is literal: it will begin to fall within two or three minutes. Serves four as written, and the powdered sugar goes on after it leaves the oven, not before.
Soufflés built on fruit jelly or purée rather than a milk-and-flour panada were a standard part of the late nineteenth-century restaurant repertoire, and could be assembled at the last minute from a jar of preserve already in the larder. Books of this period, aimed at cooks working through a long sequence of courses, sometimes list several such soufflés together, changing only the fruit -- apricot, strawberry, raspberry -- with the method held constant. The phrase "send to the table" is a reminder that the person cooking was not the person who carried the dish out.