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Boston Cream Puffs
Put half pint hot water and two-thirds cup butter over the fire; when boiling, stir in one and a half cups flour, and continue stirring until smooth and the mixture leaves the sides of the sauce-pan; remove from fire, cool, and beat thoroughly into it five well-beaten eggs. Drop on warm greased tins (or a dripping-pan), a tablespoon in a place, leaving space between to prevent touching, brush over with the white of an egg, and bake ten or fifteen minutes in a quick oven. When cakes are done, they will be hollow. When cold, slice off the top, fill space with the cream, and replace top.
This is pâte à choux, written before that name reached American home cooks. The dough behaves exactly as a modern choux does, but the baking time given is far too short and the filling is left entirely to a cross-reference.
- The measurementsHalf a pint of hot water is 1 cup (240 ml); two-thirds cup butter is about 150 g. That is a rich ratio by modern standards but it works, giving a tender, slightly fragile shell.
- Cool, but not coldThe hinge of the recipe. Let the cooked paste drop to lukewarm before the eggs go in, or they scramble and the puffs will not rise. Beat in the eggs a little at a time until the paste falls from the spoon in a thick ribbon; with five large eggs you may not need all of the last one.
- Dry the paste properly"Until the mixture leaves the sides of the sauce-pan" means keep stirring over the heat for two or three minutes after it balls up. Underdried paste makes squat puffs.
- Oven temperatureA "quick oven" in books of this period is usually glossed as somewhere around 400-450F. Starting hot to get the lift and dropping to about 375F to set the walls suits a modern oven, though the book gives no such instruction.
- Ten or fifteen minutes is not enoughExpect 25 to 35 minutes total. The puffs must be deep gold and rigid; a pale shell collapses as it cools. Do not open the oven during the first 20 minutes.
- The egg-white washBrushing with white alone gives a thin glaze without much colour. A whole egg beaten with a spoonful of water browns more evenly if you prefer that.
- The fillingThe book assumes you will turn to a cream filling given elsewhere in it. Any pastry cream, or sweetened whipped cream, suits; fill only after the shells are completely cold or the cream weeps.
- YieldNo yield is given; a tablespoon at a time from this quantity of paste should give something closer to thirty puffs. They are best filled within a few hours of baking.
Choux paste itself is old European pastry work, traditionally traced to French court cookery, though that attribution is more tradition than documented fact; it has long been standardised as the base for éclairs, profiteroles and gougères, and by the 1870s it had settled into American household books under plain-English names like "cream cakes" and "cream puffs." The "Boston" tag appears on a number of nineteenth-century sweets filled with a cooked cream or custard, as in Boston cream pie. Buckeye Cookery was first published in 1877, assembled from contributed household receipts; its name comes from Ohio, the Buckeye State, and the compilation grew out of an Ohio church fundraising effort. Its instructions assume a cook who already knows what a finished batter should look like — hence the terseness about cooling, filling and doneness.