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Baked Sweet Omelette Souffle
(Germany.) Scald and pound 2 ounces of pistachio nuts, add the yolks of 3 eggs, 1 ounce of powdered sugar, the grated rind of 1 lemon. Beat all well, add the 4 beaten whites, and put in a dish. Sprinkle thickly with sugar and bake till high and brown. Serve at once.
A soufflé omelette in the old sense: no flour, no milk, no cooked base, just yolks and nuts folded into a meringue and set in the oven. It is a five-minute batter that will not wait, so have the dish buttered and the oven hot before you separate an egg.
- The egg count is not a misprintThe egg count as printed does not match itself -- three yolks, then "the 4 beaten whites". It may be a slip, but it can be taken at face value: an extra white lightens the mixture. If you follow it as printed, keep the leftover yolk for something else rather than adding it in.
- Oven heatThe recipe gives none, only "bake till high and brown". A hot oven, in modern terms somewhere around 400F, for ten to fourteen minutes in a buttered shallow dish or gratin, until risen and coloured on top but still creamy at the centre.
- Scald and poundScalding is blanching: pour boiling water over the pistachios, stand a minute, and rub off the skins so the colour stays green rather than muddy brown. Pound or pulse to a coarse damp meal, not a smooth paste, or the mixture turns oily and heavy.
- Powdered sugarIn British books of this period this usually means finely ground granulated sugar, not modern icing sugar with its cornflour. Caster sugar is the closest match, and it dissolves into the whites without weeping.
- FoldingThe nut and yolk mixture is stiff. Slacken it with a spoonful of the beaten whites first, then fold in the rest in two additions, stopping while a few streaks remain. Overworking here is the one thing that will keep it from going "high".
- The sugar crustThe thick sprinkling of sugar over the top is not decoration; it caramelises into a thin crackling lid and helps the soufflé colour before the inside overcooks. Do it just before the dish goes in.
- Serve at onceTaken literally. It will begin to sink within two or three minutes of leaving the oven, which is why it is baked in the dish it is served from.
- YieldFour eggs makes a modest sweet for two, or three at a stretch as the end of a long dinner.
Baked or "soufflé" omelettes sat on the boundary between the omelette and the pudding through the nineteenth century, and German and Austrian cookery is often said to be where the sweet versions are most common — the same family as Salzburger Nockerl and the various baked Aufläufe, which depend on beaten egg and speed, usually with a little flour. The pistachio is the giveaway of a comfortable table: the nuts came a long way, cost accordingly, and were valued as much for their green colour as their flavour, which is why blanching off the skins mattered so much to Victorian confectioners. That this recipe is filed under a country name may be characteristic of the book, which appears to gather dishes from abroad and hand them to an English cook in a few lines, assuming she already knows what a soufflé wants and needs to be told only what is different about this one.