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Cream Puffs
1 cup water ½ cup butter 1 cup Five Roses flour 3 eggs Put the water in a granite saucepan to boil. When boiling, add butter and stir in the flour. Let cool. When cold, add the eggs well beaten. Beat all thoroughly and drop on to buttered tins. Bake 20 minutes in quick oven. When cool, slit with sharp knife. These may be filled with the following filling, but the whipped cream is much better.
A standard pâte à choux, written for cooks who already knew what the dough should look like. Two things in the original need attention: the flour goes in over heat, not off it, and the filling ingredient list is incomplete.
- Cook the paste, don't just mix itAdd the flour to the boiling water and butter and keep it over the heat, stirring, until it forms a smooth ball that pulls away from the pan and leaves a light film on the bottom — about two minutes. This gelatinizes the starch and drives off moisture, which is what makes the puffs rise hollow. The instruction "stir in the flour. Let cool" assumes this step.
- Cool, but not cold"When cold" is too far. Let the paste drop to warm, around 140F, then beat in the eggs one at a time. Cold paste takes the eggs sluggishly; hot paste scrambles them.
- Egg count is a guideEggs of the period were less standardised than modern graded eggs, so three may have meant less egg than it does now. With modern large eggs, beat in two, then add the third gradually and stop when the paste falls from the spoon in a thick ribbon and a furrow drawn through it closes slowly. Too much egg gives flat puffs.
- Quick ovenConventionally taken to mean something in the range of 400F to 450F; the book gives no temperature. If the shells seem damp inside after the twenty minutes specified, a common modern approach is to start hot for about 15 minutes to get the lift, then drop to around 350F for a further 10 to 15 minutes to dry them through.
- Don't open the doorSteam does all the work here. Opening the oven in the first 15 minutes drops the temperature and the puffs fall. Slit them while still hot to let the steam escape, rather than "when cool" — the interiors dry better that way.
- The filling is unfinishedOne cup milk, half a cup sugar and one egg will not set into a pastry cream. A workable custard needs about 2 tablespoons of flour or cornstarch and a little vanilla, cooked until it boils and thickens. The book's own aside is honest advice: whipped cream is better, and needs no cooking.
- Granite saucepanGranite ware is enamelled iron or steel, valued for a smooth, easily cleaned and non-reactive surface. Any heavy saucepan works.
- YieldAbout 12 to 15 puffs from this quantity, dropped in generous tablespoons well apart on the sheet.
Choux paste is generally traced to sixteenth-century Italian and French court cookery, and the technique of drying a flour-and-water paste over heat before enriching it with eggs was well established in French pâtisserie long before it reached North American home kitchens. What is telling here is the placement: this appears in a flour-mill cookbook, alongside plainer baking. The recipe assumes no special equipment, no pastry bag, just a spoon and buttered tins.</section>