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April 4
Menu: a; Brown Soup; Mousse of Ham; Veal Olives; Mashed Potatoes; Pear Salad; Cheese Ramekins; Rice Souffle; Spinach; Fruit Custards; Coffee Rice Souffle-4 tablespoons ground rice stirred to smooth paste with 1/2 tablespoon Crisco and 6 tablespoons milk. Add remainder of a pint of milk, and put all into a saucepan, and stir till it thickens. Add beaten yolks 4 eggs and 2 tablespoons sugar well stirred, also add the well whisked whites of 4 eggs. Mix all thoroughly, place in a Criscoed souffle dish, and bake for 1/2 hour. Serve instantly.
A soft-set milk soufflé thickened with rice flour rather than a flour roux. The original assumes a cook who knows what a soufflé wants, so the two things it leaves out — oven temperature and technique for the whites — are the two things that decide whether it rises.
- Ground riceThis is rice flour, finely milled, not cooked or broken grains. Look for rice flour in the baking aisle; the coarser "cream of rice" cereal will give a grainier body.
- CriscoThe book exists to sell it. Crisco in 1913 was hydrogenated cottonseed oil, firm at room temperature; today's product is a soybean/palm blend and behaves the same way in this quantity. Butter substitutes directly and tastes better here.
- The pintA US pint is 16 fl oz. The 6 tablespoons used to slake the rice flour are part of that pint, not extra tablespoons (about 13 fl oz) once the paste is smooth.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A soufflé of this size wants a moderate oven, 350F, on a rack set low enough that the top does not colour before the centre sets.
- Folding the whites"Mix all thoroughly" is misleading. Whisk the whites to soft peaks, stir a spoonful into the rice base to loosen it, then fold the rest in gently. Thorough mixing in the literal sense will knock out the air and give you a rice pudding.
- Cooling the baseLet the thickened rice mixture cool to warm before the yolks go in, or they will scramble in streaks. The text does not say this.
- Dish and yieldA 1 1/2-quart soufflé dish, greased and dusted with sugar so the mixture can climb the sides. Serves four as a dessert course.
- Serve instantlyMeant literally. The set is soft and the structure is steam; it will begin to sink within two or three minutes of leaving the oven.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble, two years after the company introduced Crisco as the first widely marketed hydrogenated vegetable shortening — a clean, odourless, shelf-stable substitute for lard and butter that could be sold to kosher and vegetarian households alike. The "Calendar of Dinners" section supplies a menu for every day of the year, each one quietly routing the cook back to the tin, which is why half a tablespoon of shortening appears in a dish that hardly needs it and why the dish must be baked in a "Criscoed" mould. The soufflé itself is older and borrowed: milk thickened with ground rice, enriched with yolks and lifted with whipped whites, is a standby of nineteenth-century English and French domestic cookery, closer kin to nursery rice pudding than to the cheese soufflés of restaurant kitchens.