To the editor:
“I call it a mini-soufflé because it reminds me of a big one,” I responded to a friend at supper with no details added about my secret.
The idea had come to me as I sought an alternative to poached eggs. Omelets and frittatas are fine, but fried foods do not fit on a list for healthful eating. In checking my first, and still favorite, cookbook, I found more information than I could ever digest about eggs, plus 17 recipes. Most were time-consuming and/or required baking; I wanted simple and no-oven.
The Wise Encyclopedia of Cooking Illustrated was copyrighted in 1948 and published in 1949. In 1950, I mailed $6.50 to the Wise Co. in New York City, a splurge when I was working part-time at J.J. Newberry Co. while a freshman at Ricker College. Married in June, we lived upstairs in the Court Street house that years later became Dr. Dwyer’s dental office. The stove was a two-burner hotplate; an improvised sink was temperamental; and the refrigerator was through a door and down a flight of stairs to the owners’ kitchen. Many meal ingredients were canned. A small top-of-stove baker would cook a small cake — except for the center, which always remained too soft.
Now, in the cookbook the soufflé general directions and one recipe are not with other egg recipes on pages 434-439 (preceded by six pages of general information), but on page 1099. I picture a French chef insisting that the elegant soufflé’ be separated from all the more humdrum egg dishes.
Maybe he wrote this part: “There is a popular misperception that soufflés are difficult to make and that the chances of producing a perfect dish are less than even” followed by enough conditions and warnings to keep most cooks from ever trying. Once we grant the soufflé superiority over all other egg dishes, we realize that E for eggs comes before S for soufflé in an encyclopedia.
“Never” this and “never” that are repeated in the directions, then “And never plan on a soufflé for dessert unless you know that the family or guests will be at table promptly for while the guest may be kept waiting, the soufflé cannot.” My only experience ever with a soufflé was as the guest. My new mother-in-law, in Bangor, had told her son, “Don’t be late. I’m making a soufflé and you know …” In spite of my reminding him repeatedly, we were late, the soufflé had fallen, and his mother was annoyed and upset.
Back to the present, my idea was to fork-stir an egg briefly and pour it into a poacher cup; repeat three times for my four-egg poacher. It was fun watching them puff up, right to the glass lid. Cooking them through took 10 minutes instead of the five or six for soft poached eggs. Serve them on or with anything, toast not required. There, my secret is out. Sometimes I cook four more to achieve the three-egg-protein-per-meal for two of us and save the remaining two to substitute later for cold boiled eggs.
Back home in Maine my mother “dropped” eggs into simmering water to poach them and never failed. A friend gave me a poacher after seeing what happened when I dropped them and the water failed to “catch” them correctly. That poacher has given me the cute little tasty soufflés that never fail. Should a guest arrive late, no problem: my creations, cold or reheated, would keep their shape.
