Cream Filling
1 1/2 cups scaled milk 2/3 cup sugar 1/4 cup Gold Medal flour 2 eggs 1/4 teaspoon salt Beat the sugar, flour, eggs and salt together and stir into the scaled milk; cook fifteen minutes, stirring often. When cold flavor with vanilla. Cut a small slit in the side of the eclair and fill with a pastry tube.
A flour-thickened pastry cream, written for a cook who already knew to keep it off direct high heat. The proportions are sound; the method needs a little translating.
- Scalded milk"Scaled" is almost certainly a slip for scalded — milk heated to about 180F, just until a rim of bubbles forms at the edge of the pan. With raw milk, scalding served to kill bacteria and destroy enzymes; with pasteurized milk it simply speeds the cooking.
- Temper, don't dumpThe instruction to stir the egg mixture into the hot milk works only if you add a ladleful of hot milk to the eggs first, whisk smooth, then return it all to the pan. Poured in cold and all at once, the eggs will curdle at the bottom.
- Fifteen minutes means a double boilerA flour custard held over direct heat for a quarter hour will scorch and go grainy. Set the pan over simmering water, or use a heavy saucepan over low heat and whisk constantly. Either way the real test is texture, not the clock: the cream should boil gently for a full minute or two so the flour loses its raw taste, then thicken enough to hold a line drawn across a spoon.
- Flour, not cornstarchA quarter cup of flour to a cup and a half of milk gives a soft, slightly opaque cream that slices cleanly — the classic eclair filling. Substituting cornstarch measure for measure will produce something noticeably firmer and glossier; use about half as much if you go that way.
- CoolingPress plastic wrap or buttered paper directly onto the surface as it cools, or you will get a skin that beats into lumps. Cool it to room temperature before adding the vanilla — about a teaspoon — since the flavor volatilizes in a hot custard.
- Food safety in the coolingAn egg-and-milk cream left to cool slowly on the counter is the classic culprit in old bakery outbreaks. Cool it quickly in a shallow pan, refrigerate, and use within two or three days.
- YieldAbout two cups, enough to fill roughly a dozen eclairs or cream puffs, or to layer one 8-inch cake.
- Filling the eclairsA small plain tip works better than a star tip through the side slit. Fill until you feel resistance and the shell just begins to gain weight in your hand; overfilling splits the seam.
Flour-thickened pastry cream — French crème pâtissière, the standard filling for eclairs and cream puffs since at least the nineteenth century — appears in American home-cooking literature in the form of choux pastry recipes. Its appearance in a Gold Medal booklet is doubly deliberate: milling companies published these collections to demonstrate the versatility of their product, and a filling that uses flour rather than cornstarch as the thickener makes the point neatly. Washburn-Crosby, the Minneapolis miller behind Gold Medal, was among the most energetic of these publishers, and the recipe pamphlet was a standard piece of grocery-trade advertising in the first decades of the twentieth century. The instruction to cut a slit in the side of the eclair and fill it with a pastry tube also tells you something about the audience: whoever was meant to follow it was expected to have a piping bag to hand.