"Born in a trunk", they say when a theatrical sups grease-paint with mothers milk, and if there be a ary equivalent of the phrase then surely I merit it, for was I not ceived the while a soufflé rose? A lobster soufflé, very choice, twenty-five minutes in a medium oven.
And the very first soufflé that ever in her life as e mam was called upon to make, ordered up by some French duc, house guest of Sir and Madam, me mam pleased as punch to fix it for him since few if any fins becs pecked their way to our house, not even during the two weeks of the Great Grouse Shoot when nobs rolled up in droves to score the feathered booty of the skies. Especially not then. Palates like shoe leather. "Pearls before swine," my mother would have said as she relutly sent the four and twenty courses of her Art up to the dining room, except that pigs would have exhibited mourmandise. I tell you, the English try house, yes! thats the place frub; but, only when Sir and Madam are pas chez lui. It is the staff who keep up the standards.
For Madam would touothing but oysters and grapes ohree times a day, due to the refi of her sensibility, while Sir fasted until a devilled bo sundown, his tongue having been burned out by curry when he was g a bit of Poonah. (I re those Indians hotted up his fodder out of spite. Oh, the cooks vengeance, when it strikes -- terrible!) And as for the Shooters of Grouse, all they wanted was sandwiches for hors doeuvres, sandwiches for entrées, followed by sandwiches, sandwiches, sandwiches, and their hip flasks kept replenished, oh, yes, wash it down with the amber fluid and who tell how it tastes?
So me mam took great pains with the stru of this, her very first lobster soufflé, sending the boy who ground knives off on his bike to the sea, miles, for the beast itself and then the boiling of it alive, how it e squeaking piteously crawling out of the pot etc. etc. ete mam all a-flutter before she so much as separated the eggs.
Then, just as she bent over the rao stir the flour into the butter, a pair of hands clasped tight around her waist. Thinking, at first, it was but kit horseplay, she twitched her ample hips to put him off as she slid the egg yolks into the roux. But as she mixed in the lobster meat, diced up, all nice, she felt those hands stray higher.
That was when too much in. She always regretted that.
And as she was folding ioppling tents of the bowl of beaten egg-white, God knows what it was he got up to but so much so she flings all into the white dish with abandon and:
"To hell with it!"
Into the ovehe soufflé; the oven door slams shut.
I draw a veil.
"But, mam!" I often begged her. "Who was that man?"
"Lawks a mercy, child," says she. "I hought to ask. I were that worried the I give the oven door would bring the soufflé down."
But, no. The soufflé went up like a montgolfier and, as soon as its golden head knocked imperiously against the oven door, she bust through the veil I have discreetly drawhis se of passion and emerged, smoothing her apron, in order to extract the exemplary dish amidst oohs and aahs and of the assembled kit staff, some forty-five in number.
But not quite exemplary. The et her mat the eater. The housekeeper brings his plate herself, slaps it down. "He said: "Trop de ne," and scraped it off his plate into the fire," she announces with a gratified smirk. She is a model of refi and always very particular about her aspirat
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