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Dessert

Vanilla Souffle

A light, airy dessert made with flour, butter, milk, sugar, vanilla, eggs, raspberry jam, lemon juice, sherry, and cochineal.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Vanilla and raspberry work together. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 950 recipes. Both carry ethyl benzoate, which smells fruity, sweet. The science ↓

Vanilla Souffle

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tin

  1. Grease a band of paper and secure it around the top of a 1½ pint soufflé tin. Grease the sides and bottom of the tin.

Make the base

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan, stir in the flour, then add the milk and stir until boiling.

  2. Remove from heat, add sugar and essence of vanilla, then stir in the egg yolks one by one.

Fold and cook

  1. Whip the egg whites to stiff peaks and gently fold them into the mixture.

  2. Pour the mixture into the soufflé tin, filling it about two-thirds full.

  3. Place the tin in a deep saucepan with water reaching halfway up the sides.

  4. Cover the saucepan and let it simmer slowly for 30 minutes.

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. Vanilla + raspberrytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together950 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl benzoate (fruity, sweet).

  2. Milk + vanillatop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,187 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity, apple peel).

  3. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  4. Raspberry + lemontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,109 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  5. Sugar + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Sugar and vanilla barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 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

Egg whites
Whipped to stiff peaks, they trap air and give the soufflé its light, risen structure.
Egg yolks
Stirred into the hot base, they enrich the mixture and help it set as it cooks.
Butter
Melted with the flour to form a roux that gives the base body and richness.
Flour
Cooked with the butter and then milk, it thickens the base so it can hold the whipped whites.
Milk
Forms the liquid of the base, which the flour thickens into a smooth sauce.

The step that matters

Folding the egg whites. Whites deflate when stirred or overmixed. Folding gently keeps the trapped air so the soufflé rises during cooking.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, butter, sugar, milk, vanilla, egg, raspberry):

  1. Peachfits better
  2. Blackberryfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, butter, sugar, milk, vanilla, egg, raspberry. 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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