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Chocolate Profiteroles
Make a paste same as for eclairs, using one-third cup sugar instead of three tablespoons. Add to paste while hot one ounce melted Walter Baker & Co.'s Premium No. 1 Chocolate. Cool and add eggs. Drop by spoonfuls on a slightly buttered tin sheet one and one-half inches apart, and shape with the handle of a wooden spoon as nearly circular as possible, having mixture slightly piled in centre. Bake in a moderate oven twenty-five to thirty minutes. Cool, split and fill same as eclairs.
This is a cross-reference recipe: it assumes you already have the book's éclair paste in front of you. What follows fills in the parts a modern cook needs, since the original leaves the base, the oven and the filling largely unstated.
- The paste itselfAn éclair paste of this era is standard pâte à choux; a typical formula runs about 1 cup water, 1/2 cup butter, 1 cup flour and 3 to 4 eggs, with the third of a cup of sugar substituted here. The quantities are not stated in this recipe — it sends you back to the book's own éclairs. Boil the water and butter, beat in the flour off the heat until the mass leaves the side of the pan, then cool before the eggs go in.
- Cool before the eggs, without exceptionThis is the hinge. The melted chocolate goes in while the paste is hot so it disperses, but eggs beaten into hot paste scramble and the shells will not rise. Let the paste drop to warm-to-the-touch, then beat the eggs in one at a time.
- Premium No. 1 ChocolateWalter Baker's Premium No. 1 was plain unsweetened chocolate, roughly 50 percent cocoa butter and nothing added. Use 1 oz unsweetened baking chocolate; a bittersweet bar will throw off both the sugar and the fat balance.
- Moderate ovenA moderate oven of this period is generally taken as somewhere around 350-375F; the book itself gives no figures. Modern choux practice starts hotter — 400-425F for the first 10-15 minutes to force the steam and lift, then down to 350F to dry the shells out — which accounts for the full 25 to 30 minutes.
- Do not open the door earlyThe shells set on their own steam. Opening the oven in the first 15 minutes collapses them, and an underbaked shell will sag as it cools even if it looked risen.
- ShapingA wooden spoon handle works, but a piping bag with a plain half-inch tip gives more even mounds. Keep the centre piled high as directed; that mass of paste is what hollows out.
- Buttered tin sheetA "tin sheet" is simply a flat baking sheet. Butter it very lightly or use parchment — too much fat makes the bases spread and fry rather than climb.
- Splitting and fillingSplit while barely warm so trapped steam escapes and the interiors dry. Period éclair fillings were either a vanilla cream (pastry cream) or sweetened whipped cream; the recipe simply refers back to the book's éclairs. Fill only shortly before serving or the shells soften.
- YieldThe original gives no yield; on a base of the size described above, expect roughly 18 to 24 profiteroles depending on how generously you drop them.
Choice Recipes was a promotional booklet issued by Walter Baker & Co. of Dorchester, Massachusetts — the oldest chocolate concern in the United States — and its recipes were gathered from well-known cooking-school figures of the day, including Maria Parloa and Fannie Merritt Farmer, whose Boston-school habits of measurement and phrasing run all through the book. The profiterole is French, the name generally traced to a much older word for a small gift or gratuity, and by the nineteenth century it meant a little ball of choux paste, sweet or savoury. What is distinctive here is the chocolate going into the paste rather than over it: an American booklet's way of finding one more use for the product it was selling, at a period when domestic-science teachers were the trusted intermediaries between manufacturers and home kitchens.