Home › A Calendar of Dinners › July 2
July 2
Menu: Spanish Veal Balls; Summer Squash; Buttered Beets; Lettuce and Peppergrass Salad; Snow Souffle; Iced Coffee Snow Souffle-Put 2 tablespoons Crisco and 4 tablespoons potato flour in pan, stir well together, add 1½ cup milk, pinch salt, and stir till boiling. Remove from fire, add 4 tablespoons sugar, yolks 3 eggs 1 by 1, ½ teaspoon orange flower water, and fold in stiffly beaten whites of eggs. Pour into Criscoed souffle mold, put greased paper round. Bake for 20 minutes in moderate oven. Serve at once. Pape
A small starch-thickened soufflé from the Crisco book's dinner calendar, notable for using potato flour rather than wheat and for shortening in place of butter. It is a fast bake and must go straight from oven to table.
- Potato flour is potato starchWhat the book calls potato flour is the fine white starch sold today as potato starch, not the modern gritty "potato flour" ground from whole dried potato. The starch gelatinises faster and sets more tenderly than wheat flour; do not substitute one for the other by volume.
- Moderate ovenThe book gives no temperatures; "moderate" is usually read today as somewhere around 350F. Twenty minutes suits a single mold of about a quart; individual ramekins will be done sooner.
- Crisco and the greased moldCrisco here is plain hydrogenated vegetable shortening; butter can be used instead for better flavour, bearing in mind it is not identical, as it carries water and milk solids. "Criscoed" simply means the mold is greased.
- The paper roundThe greased paper is a collar tied around the outside of the mold, standing an inch or two above the rim, to support the rise. Parchment does the same job and should be removed the moment the soufflé leaves the oven.
- Cool the base before the yolksThe instruction to remove from the fire and add the yolks one by one is the hinge. Beat the sugar in first and let the panada drop below scalding, or the yolks will curdle into threads that no amount of folding will hide.
- Orange flower waterStill sold, and still potent: a half teaspoon is a half teaspoon, not a splash. Modern bottles vary in strength, so taste the base before the whites go in. Vanilla is the usual stand-in but gives an entirely different, less floral dish.
- FoldingSlacken the stiff base with a spoonful of the whites first, then fold the rest in two additions. The base is stiff, and the air will be knocked out if it is worked too long.
- Yield and servingEnough for about four on these quantities, and "serve at once" is literal: a starch-based souffle starts to sink very soon after it leaves the oven.
Crisco was introduced by Procter & Gamble in 1911, and the company's promotional cookbooks, written by Marion Harris Neil, set out to prove that a shortening made from hydrogenated cottonseed oil could stand in for butter and lard anywhere in the kitchen -- which is why they range across whole menus and dinner calendars rather than confining themselves to pastry. The dish itself is a milk souffle built on a starch panada. The orange flower water dates it as clearly as the shortening does: distilled from bitter orange blossom, it was a common sweet flavouring in English and American kitchens through the nineteenth century, before vanilla became the default.