The Souffle that wasn't meant to be.

What better way to start a retro food blog than to start with the pinnacle of ambition in the kitchen....the souffle.
Oh, don't get me wrong, I am certainly no accomplished chef by any means but I was feeling ambitious today and thought it would be appropriate to start this blog with what I have always considered the epitome of the retro woman.
I had visions of myself pulling a steaming and perfectly puffed cheese souffle from the oven, sashaying over to the dinner table, hair coiffed and looking as if cooking this behemoth was a breeze....all to the ooohhh's and aahhh's of my admiring family.
I pulled out the vintage Reader's Digest, Creative Cooking, cookbook and researched the many techniques and recipes; cheese, corn, ham, and much to my surprise, chocolate. I quickly settled on cheese and set about making my grocery list, first on the list: a souffle dish. Little did I know that I would never make it past the first item on my list. Who knew that a souffle dish would be so difficult to find. I mean, when I say souffle dish don't all of you automatically picture a white ceramic dish, straight fluted sides? Never mind that you just don't see a souffle being made much anymore, we all still know what the dish looks like and have probably owned one at one time or another in our life. One kitchen store, one grocery store, two department stores, one yard sale, and three thrift shops later and still NO souffle dish. I could probably walk down my street and find one in every other house, shoved away in some back cabinet and forgotten about.
This was a good first lesson on retro cooking though, times have changed and so has how we cook and probably this won't be the only time I have difficulty locating a particular item for a retro recipe. That's okay though because I will substitute when I must and have fun searching out items in the mean time.