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Strawberry Souffle
Place in a small basin four ounces strawberry jelly, add two ounces fine sugar and one tablespoon maraschino. Set the basin on ice, add two egg yolks, and sharply mix with a wooden spoon for ten minutes. Beat up five egg whites to a stiff froth and add to the strawberry jelly; lightly mix with a skimmer for half minute. Pour the preparation into a souffle dish. Sprinkle a little fine sugar over, set in the oven for twenty minutes. Remove and immediately send to the table.
A soufflé built on fruit preserve rather than a cooked pastry-cream base, so it stands or falls on the egg whites and on getting it to the table fast. Two details in the original need translating before you start: the oven is unnamed, and the "strawberry jelly" is a preserve, not a gelatin dessert.
- Serve it the moment it leaves the ovenThe original's "immediately send to the table" is the whole recipe in four words. With no flour or starch in the base, nothing holds the structure once the air cools, and it will sink within two or three minutes.
- Strawberry jellyThis means a firm, strained strawberry preserve of the jam shelf, not a molded gelatin. Four ounces is a weight, roughly a third of a cup. Work it smooth with the spoon before the yolks go in.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. For a souffle of this size a moderate oven, around 375F, suits the twenty minutes the recipe specifies; the original gives no guidance on the finished texture.
- Fine sugarCaster or superfine sugar, both in the base and for the dusting. Granulated is coarser and slower to dissolve in a cold mixture.
- MaraschinoThe clear cherry-pit liqueur, not the syrup from a jar of cocktail cherries. One tablespoon is there for perfume; kirsch is the closest substitute.
- The ice bath and the ten minutesBeating cold thickens the yolk-and-preserve base so it can carry the whites without slumping. Ten minutes by hand is not an exaggeration, though a whisk cuts it to five or six.
- Five whites to two yolksThe lopsided ratio is deliberate and gives a very light soufflé. Fold with a broad flat implement (the "skimmer") in as few strokes as will combine them; streaks of white are preferable to a deflated batter.
- The dishThe recipe only says 'a souffle dish'; a straight-sided dish of roughly a quart suits this quantity. Note that the original's fine sugar is sprinkled over the top, not used to line the dish.
- YieldProbably about four modest portions. It does not keep or reheat.
Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book (1906) belongs to the era when a hotel-trained chef's repertoire was being sold to American households, and the souffle was a showpiece of that repertoire: the name is the French past participle of souffler, to blow or puff. This version takes a shortcut — no cooked base, just preserve, sugar, yolks and a great deal of beaten white. The maraschino is a period signature too. Distilled from marasca cherries and generally traced to the Dalmatian coast around Zara, it was one of the standard flavoring liqueurs of nineteenth-century confectionery, and it turns up throughout books of this vintage in ices, jellies and fruit desserts.