Home › Layer-Cakes › Cream for Inside
Cream for Inside
Take one pint milk, place one-half in a tin pail and set in boiling water; reserve from the other half two tablespoons to mix with eggs, and into the rest, while cold, mix one cup of flour until smooth; when the milk is hot, pour in the flour, and stir until thicker than boiled custard; then beat well together the two table-spoons milk, two eggs, one cup granulated sugar, a level table-spoon butter, and a tea-spoon vanilla or lemon; add gradually, and continue stirring briskly until so thick that when cold it will drop, not pour, from the spoon. The puffs may be kept on hand. Make the cream fresh, let it cool, and fill as many as are wanted. -Mrs. Ex-Governor Noyes, Cincinnati, Ohio.
This is a pastry cream — crème pâtissière — meant for filling cream puffs, though it sits in the layer-cake chapter because the same filling went between cake layers. The method is sound; only the vessels and the doneness cues need translating.
- The tin pail in boiling waterThat is a double boiler. Use a heatproof bowl or a saucepan set over simmering water, or work directly over low heat in a heavy pan if you are willing to whisk constantly.
- Slurry the flour coldThe hinge of the recipe. One cup of flour goes into the cold half-pint of milk and is worked smooth before it meets anything hot. Flour dropped into hot milk lumps instantly and no amount of beating recovers it.
- A pint is two cupsOne pint milk total, split in half: one cup heated, one cup used cold for the flour slurry, less the two tablespoons held back for the eggs.
- Temper the eggsThe two reserved tablespoons of milk beaten with the eggs are there to loosen them so they can be worked in without scrambling. Add the egg mixture gradually to the hot paste and keep it moving.
- Cook the flour outA cup of flour to a pint of milk is a very stiff cream by modern standards, and raw flour tastes of it. Keep it over the heat, stirring, for several minutes after it thickens; the eggs also need to reach a safe temperature.
- "Drop, not pour"The doneness test given is the useful one. Hot, the cream should mound heavily on the spoon; it firms further as it cools, so stop while it is still just workable.
- Cooling and keepingPress plastic wrap or buttered paper onto the surface to stop a skin forming, chill quickly, and refrigerate. This is a milk-and-egg custard: treat it as perishable and use it within two days, whatever the puffs will do.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (1877) was assembled from contributions by women across Ohio and the Midwest, and the attributions read like a roster of local prominence — this one to the wife of Edward F. Noyes, who had been governor of Ohio in the early 1870s. The cream itself is the standard French pastry cream, thickened with both flour and egg, which by the 1870s had long since passed into American home baking as the filling for cream puffs and "cream cakes." The closing note that "the puffs may be kept on hand" and the cream made fresh is practical rather than decorative: choux shells keep for days in a dry place, while a flour-and-egg custard in an unrefrigerated nineteenth-century kitchen did not keep at all, which is why the book insists on making it in small batches as wanted.