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Filling for the Puffs
One pint sweet cream, whites of two eggs; whip the cream very stiff, then beat the whites well, stir them in the cream, sweeten and flavor with vanilla. Open puffs on one side and fill.
A whipped-cream filling for choux shells, of the kind that appears in late nineteenth-century supper chapters. The problem is the two raw whites, which are never heated at any stage.
- Why the cautionThe beaten whites are folded into cold cream and eaten as-is. Nothing in the method reaches a temperature that would kill Salmonella in shell eggs, and there is no acid, sugar syrup or alcohol to help. A current recipe using pasteurized whites, or a cooked base, should be used instead.
- The filled puffs sit outThe filling is served cold and unheated -- A sweetened dairy-and-egg filling held between roughly 40F and 140F is in the range where bacteria multiply fastest, so any delay between filling and eating compounds the raw-egg risk. The recipe gives no guidance on how soon the puffs were to be eaten.
- "Sweet cream"This means fresh, unsoured cream, as distinct from the sour cream a nineteenth-century kitchen also had on hand. It is not a sweetened product; the sugar comes later in the method.
- One pintTwo cups of cream, which whips to roughly a quart of filling. No sugar quantity is given at all; the amount is left to the cook.
- "The puffs"The title implies the shells are made from a separate recipe elsewhere in the book. "Open puffs on one side" means slitting the baked shell and filling it that way rather than piping the filling in.
Choux paste reached American cookbooks through French pastry practice, and by the late nineteenth century "cream puffs" had a place in the supper chapters of household compilations like this one: cheap, impressive, and made from ingredients any kitchen had. Two kinds of filling were common. One was a cooked pastry cream thickened with flour or cornstarch, which kept a few hours in a cool larder; the other, as here, was simply whipped cream lightened with beaten whites, faster to make and lighter to eat but wholly dependent on cold and on speed. The bare instruction to "sweeten and flavor with vanilla" is of its time, addressed to a reader expected to know how much sugar a pint of cream wants.