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New York Cream Cakes
Two and one-half coffee-cups water, two coffee-cups flour, one coffee-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 minutes in a hot oven. The cream for them is made in this way. Put over the fire one cup milk, a tea-cup sugar, one egg mixed with three teaspoons corn starch and one tablespoon of butter. When cool add vanilla to taste, boil a few moments only; open the cakes on one side a little and fill with this cream. Vanilla must not be put in until taken from the fire and cooled.
This is pâte à choux and a cornstarch pastry cream, written in the shorthand of a cook who already knew both. The proportions and the order of the custard steps both need a second look.
- Coffee-cups and tea-cupsA coffee-cup in American receipts of this period is roughly a standard 8 oz cup; a tea-cup is smaller, about 3/4 cup. The two are used deliberately here, so read them as different measures rather than treating everything as a cup.
- The paste is slack as writtenModern choux runs about equal weights of water and egg with half that in butter and flour. Two and a half cups of water to two of flour will give a batter too loose to hold its shape; 2 cups water, 1 cup butter and 2 cups flour is closer to the standard proportion.
- Dry the paste in the panAfter the flour goes into the boiling butter and water, keep it over the heat and beat until it forms a smooth ball that films the bottom of the pan. This drives off water and is what lets the puffs rise hollow.
- "After it is cool"Cool means warm to the hand, not cold. If the paste is hot the eggs scramble; if it is fridge-cold it will not take them smoothly. Beat the eggs in one at a time.
- A hot oven425F for the first 15 minutes to raise the puffs, then drop to 350F to dry them out. That runs longer than the twenty minutes the recipe allows, so judge by colour and feel: they should sound hollow and feel light. Opening the door early collapses them.
- Muffin ringsThese were metal rings set on a griddle or baking sheet. Spooned mounds on a parchment-lined sheet, well spaced, do the same job.
- The cream is written out of orderWhisk the egg, cornstarch and sugar into the milk, bring it to a boil and hold it there a minute or two while stirring, or the cornstarch will not thicken and will taste raw. Beat in the butter off the heat, then the vanilla once it has cooled, which is exactly why the recipe repeats that last instruction.
- SweetnessA tea-cup of sugar to one cup of milk is very sweet by current taste. Half that gives a pastry cream closer to modern expectations.
- Filling and yieldLet the shells cool completely before slitting them, or the steam softens the filling. Expect about 18 to 24 puffs from the full quantity; fill within a few hours of serving and keep them refrigerated.
Cream cakes of this sort appear all through American community and household cookbooks of the later nineteenth century, usually under a city name: Boston cream cakes, Washington cream cakes, New York cream cakes. The technique is French pâte à choux, cooked paste raised by steam alone, which had reached American home kitchens by way of professional confectioners and the cookery books that borrowed from them. The city labels are often taken to be a matter of fashion rather than origin, marking a receipt as smart and urban; what distinguishes one from another is usually the filling, here a plain boiled cornstarch cream rather than whipped cream or a custard thickened with more egg. Cornstarch itself was a relatively new convenience, manufactured in quantity in the United States from the 1840s onward, and its arrival is one reason so many Victorian fillings and blancmanges set firm with very little egg.