Endangered Souffle - Television Tropes & Idioms

A trope that is little-used these days without actually being discredited, this could be found occasionally on Dom Coms up until the early 1970s, particularly those with child characters. A cook is attempting to bake a souffle for a fancy party or important dinner. Unfortunately, they must do so under riotous circumstances, with a consequent paranoia about the souffle collapsing. Naturally, some event — rambunctious children or a slamming door or a car backfiring — does indeed make the souffle fall, thus "spoiling" the event.

Two variations on this trope exist: In one, the rambunctious behavior around the souffle is quieted down with no ill effects, only to have a relatively-distant disturbance (slamming door, car backfire) collapse the souffle after it is "safe" (the souffle can be replaced by say, a sleeping baby). The other works much the same, except that it is the cook him- or herself which triggers the collapse.

In reality: The only way to drop a soufflé into a puddle of goo is to:

Open the oven prematurely (sponge cakes are also subject to this)
Improperly construct it so that the fat in the yolk mixture destabilizes the foamy whites mixture. Reference the relevant Good Eats episode.

Examples

Fan Fic

Used straight but comedically in the notorious 'Sith Academy' Slash Fic series; the humor of the situation comes from the fact that the person baking the chocolate souffle is Darth Maul, a vicious-minded Sith Lord who otherwise has the patience of a hyperactive weasel, while what causes it to collapse (and Maul to fly into a homicidal rage) is two Jedi Knights (Obi Wan Kenobi and Qui Gon Jinn, as it happens) having noisy sex in the apartment next door.

Film

It happens with a cake in Harriet the Spy, only Harriet deliberately stomps and knocks over some chairs after the cook tells her to be quiet.
The 2000 Charlie's Angels movie has Lucy Liu's character Alex attempting to keep her souffle intact while the trailer she's in is getting perforated with bullets. The souffle never stood a chance.
Appears in How To Murder Your Wife with the wife's famous "lasagna souffle".
A recurring gag in the Shaquille O'Neal comedy Steel.

Live Action TV

A distant relative of this trope is illustrated by the episode of I Love Lucy in which the gang is in a cabin at the base of a mountain slope, trying not to trigger an avalanche.
An underlying trope in an early episode of Chuck where Chuck believes that Sarah has poisoned the dessert she brought to his sister's dinner. Earlier in the episode, his friend had tried to pull out a tablecloth from under a ton of stuff, and it successfully ... knocked everything over. Chuck does the same thing at the dinner in an attempt to ruin the potentially poisoned food, only to have the entire meal remain perfectly in place, except for the rocking candleholder. But then, luckily, Casey brings his foot down hard, and the candle falls onto Sarah's dessert.
The Catherine Tate Show does with with a pair of new parents attending a dinner party and being forced to eat in the car for fear of waking the baby.
"Are you insane? She's asleep - we can't move her!"
Subverted in Star Trek Deep Space Nine of all places, where they sneak weapons into a prison under the pretense of delivering a souffle, and when a guard demands to investigate it, they warn him to be careful with it...right before they knock him out with the Off-Button Hypospray, causing his head to fall into the souffle and crush it.
In The Brady Bunch, Alice keeps trying to shush the kids and then collapses the souffle herself by knocking over a pan with a loud crash.

Webcomics

To stop an insane conscious Castle Heterodyne kitchen in Girl Genius one only needs to shout, "You'll collapse my soufflé!"

Western Animation

Time Squad, the one with Edgar Allan Poe.
Inverted in The Tick, where a mad baker attempts to create a giant souffle to smother The City. To collapse the souffle, the Tick must shoot himself out of a cannon at the speed of sound.
In an episode of Spongebob Squarepants, Spongebob causes the collapse of Squidward's souffle after it's removed from the oven.
Futurama. When long-time chef show host Helmut Spargle is replaced by the Emeril-esque Elzar, Elzar "BAM"s and causes Spargle's souffle to collapse.
A plot point in an episode of The Fairly Oddparents. Early in the episode, Timmy's mom tries to make a pink souffle, which collapses and turns grey (due to her poor cooking skills, although I think noise was also involved). Later, when Timmy makes a wish that everyone and everything were the same, the world goes greyscale, and everyone becomes identical blobs. Cosmo and Wanda can't find Timmy until he recreates his trademark pink hat using another of his mother's collapsed souffles, which was supposed to be grey.
This happens to Reverend Lovejoy in The Simpsons, when a phonecall from Ned Flanders distracted him long enough from his soufflé for it to collapse.
Lovejoy: Damn Flanders...

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