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Your Nostalgia Dish Says a Lot About You
Mark Bittman’s souffle is one of mine
Unlike Modernist cooking, with its dry-ice showmanship, a souffle has delivered a more old-fashioned theater of sorts for a very long time. I’m inexplicably excited by the fragile poof and shimmy of a souffle as it comes out of the oven. And in the case of a dessert, I love the piercing of its center as an entry point for creme Anglaise and an escape for a plume of steam.
Sure, a souffle is a white-guy cheffy French dish from, like, 200 years ago. But after the chef-as-rockstar decade, it’s a pleasure to look back to dishes that are less connected to who’s cooking and more resonant of a time period or a sense of place, whether it’s the American South or the South of France.
Also, I love egg whites in any and all forms, from fortune cookies to meringues, pavlovas, and financiers — and my favorite cocktail is anything in the flip family. But I’ve found that I like savory souffles more than sweet ones and would rather they get the main-dish attention they deserve.
That’s where Bittman comes in, with his “How to Cook Everything” version of a cheese souffle. Sure, we can follow Julia Child’s version or the Larousse recipe. But on a Monday night, I want to have a cookbook interaction with someone more familiar — and for dinner to feel less…
