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Dessert

Souffle Fbancais

A light, airy souffle made with butter, flour, cream, milk, egg yolks, sugar, orange water, and folded egg whites.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk 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 ↓

Souffle Fbancais

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. In a saucepan, melt the butter.

  2. Stir in the flour and cook until well combined but not browned.

  3. Gradually add the boiling cream and milk, stirring until smooth.

  4. Remove from heat and mix in the egg yolks, sugar, and orange water.

Bake and serve

  1. Whip the egg whites until light and fold them into the batter.

  2. Pour the mixture into a souffle dish and bake for 1 hour.

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

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

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + milktop 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

Egg whites
Whipped to trap air, giving the soufflé its light, risen structure.
Egg yolks
Enrich the base and help it set into a custard-like texture when baked.
Flour
Thickens the butter and milk mixture so it can hold the whipped egg whites.
Butter
Forms the fat base that the flour cooks into, adding richness to the batter.
Milk
Provides the liquid that, with the flour, forms the thick base of the soufflé.

The step that matters

Fold the whipped egg whites into the batter. Folding gently preserves the air bubbles in the whites. Stirring or deflating them causes the soufflé to rise less and turn dense.

Swap the orange

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Coconutfits better
  4. Orangethe original

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