You can go your whole life without having a single experience with something, and then quite suddenly, it is everywhere in your world.
This was how soufflé found me.
I didn’t run in soufflé circles. Growing up, my family ate cornbread crumbled in buttermilk for dessert — or my grandmother’s flour tortillas hot off her comal with butter, salt and honey. To be honest, I thought, why all the buzz for soufflé? It’s a debutante dish, flouncy and pretty, with a great presentation, sure. But it seemed all crinoline to me. Not a lot of substance.
Recipe: Vanilla Citrus Soufflés
But eventually, soufflé walked into my life very properly, as one might imagine. The first to make a meteor-size impact on me came by way of Jacqueline Margulis, the 87-year-old chef and owner of Cafe Jacqueline in San Francisco, which serves only soufflé as main and dessert.
Opening in 1979, Cafe Jacqueline has been a steady fixture in North Beach. Margulis’s setup is small and thrillingly organized: each step accounted for, every twist leading into another turn, each utensil with a place to land when it is not in use. When you see that a chef has established choreography in her kitchen, maybe do a little private curtsy, because by my estimation, you’ve found yourself in the presence of royalty.
The cafe is small, unassuming yet full of a certain kind of confidence. Once you’ve been greeted professionally and warmly, ogled the pitch-perfect variety on the menu and ordered, you’ll want to make a trip to the restroom, even if you have no business there, because it is conveniently behind the kitchen, allowing anyone to walk directly through the chef’s domain. I placed my order as fast as I could so that I could, in fact, take that walk, waving like a 5-year-old as I passed her by.
Margulis looked up from the pot over the fire, her hair just peeking out from her white chef’s hat and her chef’s coat resting easy on her shoulders. She was well into her dance, her béchamel-style base cooking away and her egg whites being beaten in real time, per order. She didn’t seem to mind my lingering, so I stayed just a little longer to watch her fold together her roux and whites, adding an exhilarating amount of shredded Gruyère.
I left sort of stunned with pleasure and inspiration. My mind raced. And because the universe seems to provide when something is meant for you, I found myself meeting soufflé again in the Loire Valley of France with the chef Naomi Pomeroy, but this time much more intimately.
When I invited Pomeroy to come cook and host workshops with me in France, I had done so based on her reputation as an exacting and wildly talented chef with great spirit, as evidenced by her excellent restaurant Beast. But I had no idea that she, too, was going to be my soufflé sherpa.
At her soufflé-demystifying session, our guests were enthralled by how she discussed technique with such friendliness and uncomplicated language. I learned along with everyone else, charmed and fascinated, then took those tips and techniques home with my memory of Cafe Jacqueline and started writing recipes.
What really struck me about cooking with Pomeroy, though, specifically regarding soufflés, was the childhood story of them. Her single mother used to whip up soufflés, varying the flavors, as often and as easily as my mother whipped up cornbread and my grandmother tortillas. She talked about soufflés as simple, rustic peasant food, all connotations good and right. Her lore of how standard these little dishes were in her life, the deep comfort they still provide and the impact they had on her as a chef were really what made me fall in love with soufflés. These kinds of stories, after all, bind all cooks — professional or not. Her mother making a life around something as simple as eggs and roux is richer to me than the reputation soufflé has earned as precious or fanciful. The truth is, making soufflé embodies why anyone who truly loves to cook does so. It’s real and true, just like the people who have built lives on how simple it all can be.
