About de Souffle

For those of you who are (a) familiar with the French cinema of the Nouvelle Vague, and (b) aware that I am a moron who does not know how to put French accents on my blog, the title of this post will strike you as a clever multilingual pun. The rest of you - tough noogies. My many faithful blog-readers (hi, Mom!) will know that I have been dealing with a surfeit of eggs this winter, and seeking out eggy recipes. It occurred to me recently that I had never made a souffle. This is odd, since it's just the type of dish that would have struck me, when I was a child, as just the type of elegant, tricky thing that I should try to cook. I was always a bit of a freak-job about food, especially food that either sounded awesome or seemed emblematic of the elegant, madcap-heiress life I longed to lead. Every so often, my mother would relent and allow/help me cook something. Jambalaya, once. Chocolate crepes filled with ice cream. I once made candied orange peels, because I read about them in a book somewhere. Nothing practical that would have actually, say, helped my mother feed her family of six. Just flights of mostly-idiotic fancy. Once, on our annual Fancy Dinner trip to the Candlewood Inn, where I had my annual lobster, I ordered a bottle of Perrier to drink because I liked the Frenchy sound of it: perry-yay. Hated the taste, as it turned out: bitter.

But souffle is something else. Although it used a parsimonious three eggs, the recipe I used made the most of those eggs. View as exhibit (a) the glorious crown of crusty cheesiness above. That is my first-ever souffle, made with Gruyere cheese (within) and Parmesan (without). The dish was buttered AND cheesed, creating that splendid rich crust all over its exterior, not just on top. Despite the fact that the necessity of utter peace and quiet whilst baking a souffle is a time-worn sitcom gag (at least from my Julia Child-hood in the Seventies), my souffle did not collapse despite the presence of children in the house. They did refrain from Irish step-dancing or playing the timpani during the baking process, but even their sporadic incursions into the kitchen did not pop my masterpiece.

Even after it deflated, the souffle looked tasty. I was expecting it to slump, post-oven, into a puddle of scrambled-egg-looking barf, but the slices maintained some of their structural integrity on the plate, and the interior of the souffle had a light, fluffy mouth-feel that tasted of the richness of butter and the tanginess of cheese. This is yet another dish where my plodding recipe-following ended up looking like kitchen genius. My husband asked me, "Is this something you can... order at restaurants?" and I had to explain to him that a souffle belongs to a sort of hidebound, traditional sort of canonical French cuisine that is the very definition of outmoded nowadays. I can't imagine what type of place you'd go to order one. It's the type of ephemeral dish that I think would be hard to cook on a large scale, but perfect for a fanciful home cook with eggs to burn. Metaphorically speaking.