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German Puffs
Put a quarter of a pint of new milk into a saucepan, with two ounces of fresh butter. When it boils, mix smoothly with it two table-spoonfuls of flour, a pinch of salt, half a small nutmeg, grated, and one heaped table-spoonful of sugar. When cool, add two well-beaten eggs. Butter some cups, rather more than half fill them with the mixture, and bake in a good oven. Serve as hot as possible, with wine or sweet sauce. Time, twenty minutes to bake. Probable cost, 6d. Sufficient for five cups.
This is a cooked flour-and-milk paste enriched with eggs — essentially a choux-type batter baked in cups — and it rises by steam alone. Everything depends on the eggs going into a cooled paste and the puffs reaching the table immediately.
- The hinge: cool the pasteIf the panade is still hot when the eggs go in, they scramble and the puffs will not lift. Spread the cooked paste out and let it come down to just warm, then beat the eggs in a little at a time until glossy.
- A quarter of a pintIn this book that is an imperial half-pint halved: 5 fl oz, or about 2/3 cup. Two ounces of butter is half a stick, and two tablespoons of flour is roughly 15–18 g — a very slack paste by choux standards, which is why these bake in cups rather than free-standing.
- "A good oven"The book gives no temperature; on the usual reckoning this means a hot rather than moderate oven, somewhere around 400F if you want a modern figure. Puffs of this type want strong initial heat to convert the milk to steam; a moderate oven gives you a dense, custardy pudding instead.
- "New milk"Fresh, unskimmed milk straight from the dairy. Whole milk is the equivalent; skimmed milk gives a thinner paste and a weaker rise.
- Cups and fillingUse ovenproof ramekins or dariole moulds of about 4 fl oz, buttered heavily and right to the rim. Filling them only slightly over half leaves room for the climb — resist topping them up.
- NutmegHalf a small nutmeg grated is a generous quantity by modern taste, perhaps 3/4 teaspoon. Start with half that if you want the egg and butter to read through.
- Don't open the ovenTwenty minutes at that heat is about right for ramekin-sized puffs, but they collapse if chilled mid-bake. Judge through the door glass and serve straight from the oven.
- Yield and sauceFive small puffs, one apiece as a dessert. "Wine sauce" at this date usually means a sweetened sauce flavoured with sherry, Madeira or a similar wine, often but not always thickened with a little butter and flour; a thin custard or a warm jam sauce serves the same purpose.
Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English cookery is full of "puffs" and "puddings" built on this cooked-paste principle, the same technique that produces choux and the Yorkshire-adjacent baked batters, and the German label attached to a great many of them signals little more than a vague continental pedigree -- the sort of geographical shorthand Victorian cookbooks used freely, alongside "Dutch", "Spanish" and "Swiss" dishes with equally loose credentials. The costing is part of the house style: sixpence for five puffs, listed as plainly as the baking time, because the book was written for households where the mistress checked the kitchen accounts.