Raisin Souffle
Seed a cupful of raisins, wash them carefully and chop them coarsely. Pour upon them a tablespoonful of brandy or two tablespoonfuls of sherry. Let them stand in this for half an hour. Beat the whites of seven eggs to a stiff meringue with seven tablespoonfuls of powdered sugar. Stir in the raisins and wine, turn all into a buttered pudding dish and bake in a steady oven for half an hour.
A baked meringue lightened with nothing but egg white, which makes technique matter more than ingredients. Two words in the text mean something other than what a modern cook assumes: "powdered sugar" and "stir".
- Fold, do not stirThe single instruction that decides the dish. Once the whites are at stiff peaks, cut the raisins and liquor through them with a spatula in as few strokes as will distribute them. Literal stirring deflates the meringue and you get a sweet omelette.
- Powdered sugarIn cookbooks of this period this generally means finely ground granulated sugar, what is now sold as caster or superfine, not modern confectioners' sugar with its cornstarch. Superfine sugar is the right substitute and dissolves cleanly into the whites.
- A steady ovenThe word points to unvarying heat rather than to any particular degree; a moderate oven, somewhere in the region of 325-350F, is a reasonable modern reading. Keep the door shut and the heat even, since a sharp drop in temperature will not help the structure.
- Seeding raisinsMuscatels of the period carried seeds and had to be split and picked over. Seedless raisins make this step unnecessary; chop them coarsely anyway, since whole raisins sink through the foam.
- Drain the fruitThe recipe says to add the raisins and the wine together, and with only a tablespoonful of brandy or two of sherry the raisins will have taken up most of it. If any liquor is standing loose in the bowl after the half hour, leave that behind rather than tipping it into the whites.
- Dish and yieldSeven whites make roughly four cups of meringue; a buttered 1.5- to 2-quart dish is about right, filled no more than two-thirds. It should serve about six, and must go to the table straight from the oven, as it begins to sink within minutes.
- DonenessSet at the edges, faintly browned on top, with a slight tremble at the centre. Thirty minutes is a fair estimate for a deep dish; a shallower one will be done in twenty.
Raisins steeped in spirit and folded into beaten whites belong to a family of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century "souffle puddings" that used no flour, no butter and no yolks, relying entirely on egg-white foam for lift. Recipes of this kind are also a convenient way of using up whites left over from custards, mayonnaise or rich cakes, though how routinely a household accumulated seven at a time is not something the recipe tells us. The seeding instruction is a useful dating clue: commercially seeded and seedless raisins became widely available in American kitchens over the turn of the twentieth century, and before that the stones had to be picked out of muscatels by hand.