Going backwards to a New Year

A recipe for Cheese soufflé

The prospect of the New Year celebratory journey into 2022 brings up sensations similar to trudging through deep snow in Louboutin boots: I don’t feel I’m properly kitted out to face the challenge. 

The distraction of a meal in a restaurant - if, indeed, we’re permitted to dine out - isn’t much of a consolation. Dishes in today’s on-trend restaurants perfectly reflect the current state of the world: Oversized plates carrying meagre portions emerge from the kitchen decorated with a muddle of conflicting gels, curds, crumbles, ‘soil’, alongside vegetables or fruits reconstructed unrecognisably into jellied cubes whose foodie language both on the crockery and on the tongue is incomprehensible. They present a confusion of mismatched contradictory ideas that are all style/no substance, and offering such limited sustenance they’re incapable of satisfying any hunger, physical or cerebral.

I’m going to go backwards, to 1970. The decade that year heralded was a similar era of economic struggle, culture shock, cultural change, technological innovation, and general upheaval. On the upside, bell bottoms and disco may have been on the gleeful rise, and the average price of a British house a not completely unaffordable £4975/$6690. But 1970 was the end of The Beatles. In the US, there was the catastrophe of the Apollo 13 space mission. A ‘New Right’ movement began, rousing ‘the people’ to the defence of political conservatism and traditional family values. The faith of much of the population that the federal government worked on their behalf was undermined by President Richard Nixon’s activities.

Where celebratory and high end food in this current dismaying decade too often is a smoke-and-mirrors reflection of the world’s lunacy and confusion, back in 1970 Britain, at least, the festive dinner at the local steak house did not succumb to any fiddle-faddle. What was on your plate tasted as it looked. Those were the days of Prawn Cocktails, Steak Diane, and Black Forest Gateau, before they were muscled aside by Brits wanting to proclaim their sudden culinary adventurousness by ordering gazpacho, stuffed peppers, savoury crepes, Pollo Sorpresa (previously and more cheaply known as Chicken Kiev), Spaghetti Carbonara, and profiteroles, served nationwide in high street trattorias with white-painted brick walls, ceramic tiles and new-fangled spotlights.

Those honest pre (faux) trattoria dishes have become abandoned by chefs for their simplicity. Today, too many media-styled ‘kitchen creatives’ need to express themselves with complexities and skills that promote them as much as artists as skilled cooks. So I’m tickled appropriately pink to see that making a comeback in some eateries is Prawn Cocktail (bathed in a Marie Rose mayo and not to be confused with the naked Shrimp Cocktail of the US, stripped bare for dunking into tomato ketchup zipped up with horseradish).

Yet something as simple as a soufflé, which featured on most fine dining menus of the 1970s, has all but disappeared from those of today. Perhaps because, while it’s not a difficult recipe, so many things can go wrong with it. It is as temperamental as any diva: Will it rise? Was the egg white over-beaten? Was the mixing bowl greasy? Was the whisk greasy? What mistake was made? So much unnecessary wringing of hands…

There’s more myth and fear surrounding the making of a soufflé than any other recipe. No wonder. A soufflé is the capturing by a chef of a French breath of air - a ‘souffle’ - in a flavoured sauce. It cannot be made in advance. It can collapse in the few paces between kitchen and table. Challenges such as the soufflé present do not face a pre-formed cube of vegetable jelly. If you’ve nothing much else to do, mix yourself a Negroni and make yourself comfortable by your oven, and watch through the glass door as it draws breath and rises. The performance is as gripping as anything in Netflix’s last season.

Nevertheless, a soufflé is not hard to make, even though I’ve had fun just now pretending it is. Chefs don’t want you to know this because then they can’t charge you an arm and a leg for creating one of the cheapest dishes on any menu. It’s just a flavoured béchamel or white sauce (which you know you can whip up falling off a log) with yolks, into which you’ve gently folded stiffly beaten egg whites.

There are only two rules: if you are making a cheese soufflé, use a good deal more grated cheese - preferably from the strongest and cheapest Cheddar (no fiddling about with percentages of Parmesan) - than most recipes call for. When she made a souffle for four, my mother, the Soufflé Queen, used at least 250g/8oz grams of whatever in the fridge was going stale (and usually needed some blue scraping off). Recipes other than hers can cite as little as 100g/3.5 oz. If there’s a trick at all, it’s that you should always add one more egg white than you have egg yolks. Two, if you’re feeling trepidatious or the eggs are small.

Like so many other examples of extreme cuisine, the soufflé was developed in Paris in the mid-1800s by master chef Marie-Antoine Carême as a result of his various wealthy employers presenting him with the recently developed oven heated by circulating air, not by coal. To be able to produce a soufflé at your table indicated you not only were in a position to avail yourself of a talented chef but of a very expensive new-fangled piece of machinery that guests would otherwise not be aware of, as it would never be exposed to public admiration.

Carême, however, wasn’t the first chef to cook them. The first mention of the soufflé is attributed to early eighteenth century French master cook Vincent La Chapelle, among whose clients were the 4th Earl of Chesterfield, William IV, Prince of Orange, John V of Portugal, and Madame de Pompadour, the favourite mistress of Louis XV of France. He, unlike the fortunate Carême, would have been magicking them from a wood or coal-burning stove.

With the development of modern ovens, soufflés grew in popularity and became a key feature of fine dining in wealthy society from Paris to London and New York. One of the reasons they have disappeared from restaurant menus now is that they need to be pre-ordered by the first course so that diners aren’t hanging around taking up a rebookable table while waiting for its arrival. Also, they require dedicated oven space, which makes them less commercially viable.

If the soufflé does make a comeback, it’s more likely on the dessert menu than as an entrée. A sweet soufflé, covered in a drift of icing sugar with a server standing by to prod it delicately with a spoon in order to pour into the hole a light crème anglaise or scoop of ice cream is a performance with which the delivery of a cheese soufflé cannot compete.

So here’s how to make it at home, because - PLEASE! - could we not all try to souffler a breath of fresh air into 2022?

Here’s my mother’s cheese soufflé recipe:

Make a fairly thick béchamel sauce from around 200ml/6.75fl oz of warmed milk. While hot, take it off heat and add 300g/10.5oz grated strong cheese. Stir till melted, season with grinds of black pepper, a little grated nutmeg or some cayenne pepper, then, one at a time, drop in four egg yolks whose whites you have separated off into a large clean bowl. Add one or two extra egg whites to the mixing bowl contents and whisk to firm peaks. Dump a quarter of the froth into the cheesy béchamel and briskly incorporate to loosen the sauce. Then carefully fold in the remainder, making sure no egg white remains to be seen. Pour into a greased souffle dish and bake for 20-30 minutes in an oven pre-heated to 200C/390F which you turn down at once to 180C/350F. The length of time depends on how runny you like the centre of your souffle. 

If that lack of precision is a bit daunting, try this:

Serves 4

50g/1.75oz butter 
50g/1.75oz plain flour
200-300ml/7-10fl oz milk, heated 
300g/10.5 oz leftover hard cheese, grated
4 large eggs, separated plus one extra egg white
grating of nutmeg
pinch cayenne pepper
Salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste

Preheat oven to 200C/390F. 

Melt the butter in a saucepan. Grease a 20cm/7.75ins soufflé dish with some of it, then, if you wish - my mother not once ever did - dust with grated Parmesan. In the saucepan, stir the flour into the melted butter, stir till it turns a light gold and sandy. Very gradually, a little at a time, pour in the heated milk to make a béchamel sauce and stir till thick over low heat, cooking out the flour taste for around 3-5 minutes. (The difference in the quantity of milk cited relates to different types/freshness of flour and types of butter whose water content can affect the sauce. What you want to finish with is a thick custard-like sauce. Start with 200m/6.75fl oz milk, adding the extra 100ml/3.5fl oz if the sauce is too stiff to introduce the cheese into it. Stir in the cheese to melt. Draw off the heat, then one by one beat in the egg yolks. Season to taste, then add the nutmeg and cayenne pepper.

In a clean bowl, whisk the egg whites until stiff. Beat a quarter into the cheese sauce, then carefully fold in the rest, making sure there’s no white showing, then pour into the soufflé dish and place in the centre of the oven. Turn the heat down to 180C/350F. Bake the soufflé for 25-30 mins until puffed up and golden, 20 minutes if you like the base a little runny.

Serve with a salad and some crusty bread on the side.