Cream Puffs
1 cup Gold Medal flour 1/4 teaspoon salt 1 cup boiling water 1/2 cup butter 4 eggs Add the salt and butter to the water. When boiling add the flour, all at once, stirring constantly until the mixture leaves the side of the pan; remove from the fire and add the unbeaten eggs, one at a time, beating continually. Drop by spoonfuls onto a buttered pan, about two inches apart. Bake in a moderate oven for twenty-five minutes. When cool, with a sharp knife make a cut in the top or side and with a pastry tube fill with cream filling.
This is standard pâte à choux in period language, and it still works, though the baking directions are the weak point and worth correcting before you start.
- Start hot, then drop the heatTwenty-five minutes in a "moderate" oven (usually read as about 350F) is on the short side, and the shells are likely to come out underdried. Choux does best with an initial blast of steam: bake at 425F for about 15 minutes until fully puffed and set, then reduce to 350F for another 15 to 20 minutes to dry the shells through. A puff that looks brown but feels light and hollow is done; one that gives under a finger will collapse.
- The hinge: dry the paste before the eggs"Stirring constantly until the mixture leaves the side of the pan" is the whole recipe. Keep the pan on the heat and keep working the paste for a minute or two after it balls up, until a thin film forms on the pan bottom. Excess water here is the usual cause of flat, greasy puffs.
- Cool the paste, then add eggs"Remove from the fire" means let it stop steaming for three or four minutes before the first egg goes in, or the egg scrambles. Beat each one in until the paste is smooth again before adding the next.
- Four eggs is a guide, not a ruleEgg sizes were not standardized in this period and were frequently smaller than today's large. Add the fourth egg in two halves and stop when the paste falls from the spoon in a thick, glossy ribbon rather than dropping in a lump. Too much egg and the puffs will spread.
- Measurements1/2 cup butter is 4 oz (113 g), one standard stick. The 1 cup flour, unsifted, is roughly 4 1/2 to 5 oz; against 1 cup (8 oz) of water this is a wetter paste than modern recipes, which use closer to equal weights of water and flour.
- Do not open the ovenThe original says nothing about it. Opening the door in the first 20 minutes drops the steam pressure and the shells fall. Wait until they are firm and coloured.
- Vent themThe knife cut is best made while the puffs are still hot, not "when cool" — a small slit lets trapped steam escape so the interiors dry instead of turning damp. Then cool completely before filling.
- Yield and holdingAbout 12 large or 18 small puffs. Fill within a few hours of serving; a custard or whipped-cream filling softens the shells quickly, and filled puffs need refrigeration.
Cream puffs are the Anglo-American form of French choux à la crème, built on the cooked flour-and-butter paste generally traced to early French pastry cooks — the familiar attributions are a mix of tradition and later refinement — and that nineteenth-century American cookbooks adopted almost unchanged. The technique is unusual in a home baking chapter because it uses no chemical leavening and no yeast at all: the rise comes entirely from water turning to steam inside a stiff egg batter, which is why the method insists on cooking the paste dry and beating the eggs in one at a time. Its appearance in a flour-company cook book is telling — books like this one were promotional, issued to persuade housewives that a branded, consistently milled flour could handle demanding work, and choux is exactly the sort of recipe that fails visibly when the flour or the technique is wrong. The instruction to fill with a pastry tube is suggestive rather than datable evidence, since bags and tubes were already in domestic use before 1900.