Tastes Like Vintage: Cheese Souffle served with Warm Kale Pear Salad and Mulled Wine 1

This week’s Tastes Like Vintage post is by Ms. Jeannie Ology.

photos by Ms. Jeannie

Deciding what to cook and eat just before a big holiday like Thanksgiving can be a bit of a challenge. At Ms. Jeannie’s house Thanksgiving is pretty much the only time when food is packed in the refrigerator and allocated for certain dishes to be prepared at certain times. You know how it goes – two sticks of butter here, the roll of goat cheese there, eggs for this, bacon for that, all so that you can avoid that inevitable last minute trip to the grocery store for replacements! Ms. Jeannie would much rather be enjoying a glass of wine than waiting in line:)

Also in an effort to eat a little bit more light, on the days leading up to Thanksgiving so that every single bit of turkey dinner can be enjoyed, Ms. Jeannie is always on the lookout for simple, easy to prepare recipes that are, at least, semi-healthy and at most not too heavy. This year, she found a perfect match in the 1961 Bangkok Edition of the YWCA Cookbook.

The cookbook itself is a mini 1960’s time capsule. Written half in English and half in Thai, it contains 145 pages of recipes submitted by the United States Operations Mission (USOM) Women’s Club in Bangkok. Every year, they held an International Bazaar sponsored by the Bangkok YWCA and this cookbook is a collection of all the different cultures and cuisines that were represented. It contains everything from traditional Mexican cuisine to Italian, French, Chinese, Indian, Scandinavian, Eastern European, etc…and it is peppered with 1960’s advertisements for airlines, food products, utility companies, and illustrated throughout with black and white line drawings. It is fabulously fun both in content and presentation!

So it is from this cookbook that Ms. Jeannie pulled a perfect pre-Thanksgiving dinner…Souffle Au Fromage aka Cheese Souffle! This recipe is incredibly light and fluffy, packed full of flavor and requires just 15 minutes to put together before it goes into the oven. Ms. Jeannie paired it with a warm kale and pear salad for some extra green vitamins and the mulled wine adds a bit of holiday festivity! Another nice element about this recipe is that it uses all “spare” ingredients that you mostly likely already have on hand due to your Thanksgiving cooking, so you didn’t need to make any special grocery trip to prepare this meal or try to sort out extra storage space in your fridge.

While this souffle is a really simple recipe to make, Ms. Jeannie advises that you have all your ingredients prepared before you melt the butter in the saucepan – because once you start that process all the ingredients are added fairly quickly one right after the other. The kale and pear salad can be made right after your souffle goes in the oven as well as the mulled wine.

Cookbook: YWCA Cookbook – Bangkok 1961 Edition
Edited by: Mrs. Carl Capen

Cheese Souffle for six

(recipe submitted by Madame F. Geoffroy Dechaume)

4 tablespoons butter
2 cups milk (Ms. Jeannie used 2% milk)
1 cup grated Gruyere cheese
4 tablespoons flour
3 eggs

Place in a deep pan the butter, add flour and stir over low flame (Ms. Jeannie cooked over medium low heat), slowly adding the milk until you get a thick and perfectly smooth white sauce (Bechamel).

Remove from fire and add three yolks of eggs, grated cheese and seasoning (salt and pepper – to taste); then stirring very gently, add the three whites of eggs previously beaten to a thick snow. Pour the preparation into a buttered mold or Pyrex container- preferably deep and place in hot oven for 20 minutes (this really turned out to be a 350 degree oven for 40 minutes) . Serve as soon as the souffle has raised to a golden mushroom (which means until the top is a medium brown and the souffle is only slightly slightly jiggly when the dish is shaken.)

Once the souffle comes out of the oven it is best to take it right to the table to serve because after a few minutes it falls due to the cool air.

Warm Kale and Pear Salad

3 pears, cored and cubed (bite size pieces)
16 oz. of fresh Kale, trimmed of fibrous sections and roughly chopped
Olive oil for drizzling
Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste

Add just enough water to cover the bottom of a large pot, add kale and steam for 10 minutes, covered, on medium low heat or until all the water has evaporated. Toss lightly with olive oil, add chopped pears and season with salt and pepper, toss again. Cover kale and pears again and keep warm on low heat while the souffle cooks, tossing occasionally to circulate the juices from the pears. Serve immediately alongside souffle.

Mulled Wine

Ms. Jeannie used a 1.5 liter bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon and mulling spices from Trader Joe’s. www.traderjoes.com/

The mulling spice package recommended adding sugar but she didn’t add any sugar since she was serving it with dinner. If you choose to serve it as a dessert – then you may want to add a little extra sweetness:)

Otherwise you just pour the bottle of wine into a large saucepan, add the spices and cover on medium heat for 15 minutes, then reduce heat to low, still covered, for 20 minutes or until your souffle is done. Turn off heat, remove spice packet and serve in tea cups.

It’s a happy pre-Happy Thanksgiving dinner:)