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Cheese Souffle (One cupful of grated cheese)
One cupful of grated cheese, one cupful of milk, tablespoonful of flour, a little salt, dash of cayenne. Stir milk, cheese and flour together and heat them, add two well beaten eggs. Bake fourteen minutes. To be eaten as soon as baked.
A very lean soufflé by modern standards — barely more than a cheese sauce set with egg — and the original gives no oven temperature or dish size. Both need filling in before you start.
- Oven temperatureNone is given, and fourteen minutes only makes sense in a hot oven. Bake at 400F; anything slower will not set the edges before the centre weeps.
- Dish size and yieldFourteen minutes points to shallow or individual dishes, not a tall soufflé mould. Four buttered ramekins, or one 8-inch gratin dish, will serve two as a supper dish or four as a savoury course.
- Two eggs, wholeThe recipe folds in whole beaten eggs, so expect something closer to a baked cheese custard than a risen soufflé. Separating the eggs and folding in the stiffly beaten whites at the end is the standard later practice and gives the lift the name implies.
- The flour is a thickener, not a rouxOne tablespoon to a cup of milk barely binds. Whisk the flour into the cold milk before heating so it does not lump, and cook it a minute or two after it thickens to lose the raw taste.
- Temper the eggsThe recipe has you heat the cheese mixture before the eggs go in, and it may well be hot enough to curdle them. Take it off the heat for a few minutes, or stir a little of it into the beaten eggs first, or you risk scrambling them.
- CheeseAn unspecified 'grated cheese' of this kind was most often a firm cheese of the cheddar type. A sharp aged cheddar at about 4 oz to the cup works; soft or high-moisture cheeses will loosen the mixture.
- Salt"A little" is right — aged cheddar carries a lot of salt of its own. Season at the end, after the cheese has melted in.
- Serve at onceThe instruction is not decorative. Egg-set cheese mixtures deflate and turn grainy within a few minutes of leaving the oven.
Cheese soufflés and cheese "fondus" were a staple of American and English household books through the later nineteenth century as a cheap hot savoury — a way to turn a cupful of grated cheese and some milk into a dish for the middle of a light supper or the end of a formal dinner. Compilations of this kind often carry several versions side by side, from bread-crumb-bound puddings to the more ambitious separated-egg kind, and the terminology is loose: soufflé, fondu and cheese pudding often describe much the same thing. The brevity here is typical of the genre, which often assumed the reader already knew what a soufflé looked like and needed only the proportions.