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Favorite Puffs
Two and one-half cups water, two cups flour, one cup butter, five eggs. Boil the butter and water together, stir in the flour while boiling; after it is cool, add the eggs well beaten, put a large spoonful in muffin rings and bake twenty or thirty minutes in a hot oven.
This is cream puff paste — pâte à choux — under a nineteenth-century American name. The method is sound, but the proportions and the vessel need translating.
- The hinge: dry the paste on the heatStir the flour into the boiling butter and water and keep it over the burner, beating, until the dough pulls together into a smooth mass that leaves a film on the pan bottom. Paste that is still wet at this stage will not have the internal steam pressure to hollow out, and you get dense little cakes instead of puffs.
- Proportions run wetProportions run wet at the flour stage -- Two and a half cups water to two cups flour is more liquid than modern choux, which is usually near equal volumes of water and flour. The egg is proportionally low, though — five eggs to two cups flour, where modern practice is nearer four eggs per cup of flour — so the finished paste may not be as slack as the water alone suggests. Judge by consistency rather than by the numbers, and hold back part of the water at the start if you want a stiffer paste.
- Cool before the eggs, but only just"After it is cool" means warm to the hand, not cold. Very hot paste scrambles the egg; fully cold paste takes the egg in reluctantly. Beat the eggs in a little at a time until the paste is glossy and falls from the spoon in a thick ribbon.
- A hot oven425–450°F. The blast of early heat is what raises them. Do not open the door during the first fifteen minutes.
- Muffin ringsThese were plain metal rings set on a flat baking sheet. A greased muffin tin works, or simply drop spoonfuls onto a parchment-lined sheet an inch and a half apart — free-standing puffs brown better on the sides.
- Judging donenessTwenty to thirty minutes is right, but go by colour and weight: deep golden brown, dry to the tap, and light in the hand. Pale puffs collapse as they cool. Pierce each one to let the steam out and return them to a turned-off oven for a few minutes to dry the interior.
- Yield and servingThis quantity gives roughly two dozen puffs. Split and filled, the shells take creamed chicken, oysters or sweetbreads for a savoury dish; the same paste takes whipped cream or pastry cream for dessert.
Choux paste reached American cookbooks through French pastry practice in the nineteenth century, and it turns up in domestic manuals under homely English names — puffs, cream cakes — often with no mention of its origin. A hollow shell is a container, and the late Victorian table leaned heavily on savoury creamed mixtures served inside something, whether pastry shell, toast case or puff. The technique itself is older than the fashion, generally traced to Italian and French court cooks of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and it is one of the few pastries that depends on cooking the flour before baking rather than on keeping fat cold and separate.