Cream Puffs
1 cupful water 1 cupful flour 5 tablespoonfuls Crisco 4 eggs 1/4 teaspoonful salt Put Crisco into small saucepan, add water, bring to boiling point, add quickly flour and salt, stir well with wooden spoon until mixture leaves sides of pan, remove pan from fire, allow mixture to become cool, but not cold, add eggs, one at a time, and beat each one thoroughly in. Set in cool place one hour. Put mixture into forcing bag with tube and force it on to a tin greased with Crisco into small rounds; bake in hot oven forty minutes. When cold split them open on one side and fill with whipped cream sweetened and flavored to taste. To make eclairs with this mixture press it on to tins in strips three and a half inches long, and a little distance apart. Brush over tops with beaten egg and bake in moderate oven thirty minutes. Cut open one side, then fill and dip top into chocolate icing.
Sufficient for fifteen cream puffs.
This is standard pâte à choux, written for the Crisco kitchen of 1915. The proportions are sound; only the oven directions and the shortening need translating.
- Crisco, and what to use insteadCrisco in 1915 was newly introduced hydrogenated vegetable shortening, promoted heavily in books like this one. Five tablespoons is about 2 1/2 oz; unsalted butter works in the same quantity and gives better flavor, though shortening yields a slightly higher, drier shell.
- Oven numbersThe book gives no temperatures; in period usage a "hot oven" is usually read as somewhere around 400-450F and a "moderate" oven around 325-375F. Forty minutes at a steady 425F risks over-browning in modern pans: bake at 425F for 15 minutes to force the rise, then drop to 350F for another 20 to 25 minutes until the shells are deep gold and feel light and hollow.
- The hinge: dry the paste, then cool itStir the flour paste over the heat until it films the bottom of the pan and pulls cleanly from the sides. That drives off water and lets the dough take all four eggs. "Cool but not cold" means below about 140F, or the eggs will scramble.
- Egg consistency over egg countFour eggs is a guide, not a rule; flour absorbs differently now. Add the last egg gradually and stop when the paste falls from the spoon in a thick, glossy ribbon and a piped mound holds its shape.
- The one-hour restChilling the paste an hour is optional by modern practice and mainly makes it easier to pipe. If your dough is already firm, pipe at once; a warm oven and a cold pan are both worse for the rise than a short rest.
- Don't open the doorThe steam trapped inside is what inflates the puffs. Leave the oven shut for the first 20 minutes; a sudden draft collapses them. If the shells feel damp when cool, return them to a 300F oven for 5 to 10 minutes to dry the interiors.
- Egg washBrushing beaten egg over the éclairs gives gloss but can glue the sides down and check the rise. Brush lightly, and keep it off the pan.
- Filling and yieldFifteen puffs from this batch is realistic; the same paste makes about a dozen éclairs. Fill only once the shells are completely cold, and within a few hours of serving, since whipped cream softens the shells quickly. Refrigerate anything filled with cream.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and published by Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, which had gone on sale in 1911; that is why a shortening appears in the ingredient list of a pastry that Europe had made with butter for well over a century. The paste itself is pâte à choux, generally traced to Italian and French court cooking of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and standardized in the nineteenth by Parisian pastry cooks, whose piped fingers of it filled with cream became the éclair. Neil's inclusion of both shapes in one entry, with a forcing bag and tube taken for granted, shows how thoroughly French pastry technique had entered the American middle-class kitchen by the 1910s, and how briskly the new industrial fats were being fitted into it.