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Cream Puffs
One-half cup of butter melted in one cup of hot water; put in a small pan on the stove to boil, and while boiling stir in one cup of flour; take off and let cool. When cold, stir in three eggs one after the other, without beating. Drop on buttered tins and bake in a hot oven from ten to twenty minutes.
Filling-One cup of milk, one-half cup of sugar, one egg, one tablespoon of cornstarch. Boil until thick, and flavor with vanilla. Cut top off puffs and insert filling.
MRS. E. S. Root.
This is pâte à choux under a plainer name, and the method is sound as written. A few points are worth spelling out, since the receipt assumes a cook who has watched someone else do it.
- The hinge: dry the pasteOnce the flour goes into the boiling butter and water, keep stirring over the heat for two or three minutes until the paste pulls into a smooth ball and leaves a thin film on the pan bottom. Skipping this leaves the dough too wet to rise into a hollow shell.
- "Let cool" means warm, not cold"Let cool" — the receipt says to wait until the paste is cold, but modern practice is to cool it only until warm to the touch, around 140F: cold paste is stiff and takes the eggs less readily, while hot paste scrambles them. Add the eggs one at a time and work each in fully; "without beating" most likely means the eggs are not whipped beforehand rather than that the paste is left unworked.
- Egg sizeEggs of the period were not graded as they are now and may well have run smaller than today's large eggs. Add the third gradually and stop when the paste falls from the spoon in a thick ribbon that holds a soft peak.
- "A hot oven"425F. Start there for the first 15 minutes to drive the steam that inflates the shells, then drop to 350F for another 15 to 20 minutes to dry them out. The stated ten minutes will not set the walls, and puffs pulled early collapse.
- Test before removingA finished shell is deep golden and light in the hand, and sounds hollow when tapped. Pierce each one with a knife tip as it comes out to let the steam escape.
- The filling must boilCornstarch pastry cream needs to reach a full bubble and hold it a minute, both to thicken properly and to destroy the enzyme in the egg yolk that would otherwise thin it back down as it sits. Whisk constantly, and add the vanilla off the heat.
- Chill the filling, fill lateCool the cream with a sheet of plastic on its surface and refrigerate it. Fill the puffs no more than an hour or two before serving or the shells soften. Leftovers keep in the refrigerator, not on the counter — this is a custard.
- YieldAbout twelve puffs of two-inch diameter, or two dozen smaller ones. The filling makes roughly a cup and a quarter.
Choux paste — flour cooked into boiling liquid, then loosened with eggs — is generally traced to Italian and French court cookery of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and reached American home kitchens through the pastry-shop trade and the printed cookbooks of the nineteenth century. By the time this receipt was collected in a Catskill village, cream puffs would have suited church suppers and fair tables well enough: the ingredients are pantry staples, the paste needs no yeast, no chemical leavening and no proofing, and the shells can be baked in the morning and filled before the doors open. What the receipt does not say is as telling as what it does. Mrs. Root seems to write for neighbors presumed to know what a hot oven felt like and how a proper paste behaved in the pan, since she records only the proportions and leaves the judgment to the cook.