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Cream Puff Balls
1 cupful flour 1/2 cupful Crisco 1/2 cupful water 4 eggs 1/2 teaspoonful salt Put Crisco and water into small saucepan, bring to boil, add quickly flour and salt, stir well with wooden spoon until mixture leaves sides of pan, remove from fire, allow to cool, but not become cold, add eggs, beating each one thoroughly in. Turn mixture on to well Criscoed plate and divide into small puffs or cakes. Put on Criscoed tins and bake a golden brown in hot oven, thirty minutes. These puffs may be filled with preserves, custard, or savory mixtures.
Sufficient for thirty puffs.
This is standard choux paste, written for a book Procter & Gamble published to promote Crisco, which is why the shortening is named rather than described. A few points of technique are compressed almost to invisibility in the original.
- The hinge: cool before the eggsThe paste must drop to roughly body temperature before the eggs go in, or they scramble and the puffs will not rise. Beat each egg in completely so the paste comes back together before adding the next; the finished paste should fall from the spoon in a thick, glossy ribbon.
- "Hot oven"In books of this period that means roughly 400-450F, so around 425F is a fair reading. A common modern approach is to start hot for the first 10-15 minutes to force the steam expansion, then drop to about 350F for the remainder of the thirty minutes to dry the shells without burning them.
- Do not open the doorThe original says nothing about it, but choux collapses if the oven is opened while the walls are still soft. Leave them alone for at least the first twenty minutes.
- CriscoCrisco in 1915 was hydrogenated cottonseed oil, the book's sponsor. Modern all-vegetable shortening works identically here; unsalted butter gives better flavour in the same quantity, though butter's water content makes the paste slightly softer.
- Shaping"Turn mixture on to well Criscoed plate and divide into small puffs" is a hand-shaping instruction. A pastry bag with a plain half-inch tip, or two spoons, is faster and gives more even puffs. Grease the sheet lightly or use parchment.
- Drying the shellsWhen they are golden and firm, pierce each puff or split it and return it to a turned-off oven for a few minutes. Trapped steam otherwise softens the interior as they cool.
- FillingFill only when completely cold, and as close to serving as possible. Custard-filled puffs need refrigeration and are best eaten the same day; the shells themselves keep well and re-crisp in a 300F oven.
- YieldThirty puffs means small ones, about a tablespoon of paste each — teatime size rather than dessert profiteroles. Larger puffs will need closer to 35-40 minutes.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and published by Procter & Gamble in the mid-1910s as an extended advertisement for Crisco, which had come on the market in 1911; the recipes call for the product by name, which is why fat appears here as a brand rather than as "shortening" or "butter". The paste itself is far older "chowater enriched with eggs and leavened only by its own steam, is documented in French pastry work well before the nineteenth century, and English and American books had been printing versions under names like "cream cakes" for decades. The note that the puffs may be filled with "preserves, custard, or savory mixtures" reflects the American habit of treating the shell as a neutral container.