A Viennese Soufflé-Pudding, Called Salzburger Nockerl

Instructions

1. NOTE BEFORE STARTING: Acton did not test this. It arrived direct from Vienna at the moment the book went to press, written by a physician of Vienna at whose table the dish was served, and she offers it to the reader 'for trial' on the assurance that it is one of the most delicate souffle-puddings that can be made. The uncertainties she flags are kept in the steps below.
2. (A) Take butter, four ounces; sugar in powder, three ounces; fine flour, one ounce and a half or two ounces; and the yolks of eight eggs. Beat these together in a convenient sized basin till the mixture gets frothy. (Acton's parenthesis: the butter should probably first be beaten to cream.)
3. (B) Beat to snow the whites of the eight eggs.
4. (C) Take three pounds (or pints) of new milk, put it in an open stewpan over a gentle fire, and let it boil.
5. (D) Prepare a china casserole - an enamelled stewpan; a copper one will do - by greasing its internal surface.
6. As soon as the milk boils, mix A and B gently together. With a small spoon take portions of the mixture and lay them over the surface of the boiling milk till it is entirely covered. The portions should be the shape, and about half the size, of the inside of an egg-spoon.
7. Let them boil for four or five minutes to cook them, then place them in convenient order on the ground of the greased casserole.
8. Go on in the same manner, cooking small portions of the mixture on the surface of the boiling milk and placing each new layer in the stewpan over the first, until the mixture is all used.
9. Take the remainder of the milk and add it to the beaten yolks of two eggs, some sugar, and some powdered vanilla.
10. Pour this over the cooked pastry in the stewpan and set it into a gently heated oven. Leave it there until it gets brown, then powder it with vanilla-sugar and send it to the table.
11. To make vanilla sugar: cut the bean up small, pound it with some sugar in a mortar, and pass it through a very fine sieve.
12. Acton's suggestions, offered as untried improvements: the dish was turned out of the casserole and served with the greatest expedition, but she thinks it would perhaps answer more generally in England to bake it in a souffle dish and leave it undisturbed; the yolk of a third egg might sometimes be needed to bind the mixture; half the proportions might, by way of experiment, be prepared and baked in a tart-dish, or in a small round cake mould with a band of writing paper fastened round the top. She also observes that the enamelled stewpans commonly made in England are not well adapted to this receipt, and that copper ones are better suited.