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Meat Souffle

A baked dish of cold cooked meat folded into a thickened milk or cream base with eggs and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Meat Souffle

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the base

  1. Heat the milk or cream in a saucepan.

  2. Thicken the milk or cream with butter and flour.

  3. Season with chopped parsley and onion juice.

  4. Stir in the cold cooked meat.

  5. Add the beaten yolks of the eggs and cook for 1 minute.

  6. Set aside to cool.

Bake and serve

  1. Fold in the stiffly beaten egg whites.

  2. Pour the mixture into a buttered dish.

  3. Bake at 400°F (200°C) for about 20 minutes.

  4. Serve immediately.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Parsley + oniontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + parsleytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Yolks enrich the base, and whipped whites give the souffle its light, risen structure.
Milk or cream
Forms the liquid base that the flour thickens into a smooth sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, helping the thickened base taste smooth and full.
Flour
Thickens the hot milk with butter into a sauce that holds the meat and eggs.
Cold cooked meat
Provides the main substance and flavour of the souffle.

The step that matters

Fold in the stiffly beaten egg whites. Folding gently keeps the air in the whites. Deflating them makes the souffle rise poorly and turn dense when baked.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, butter, flour, parsley, meat, egg):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, butter, flour, parsley, meat, egg. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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