Ham Puffs
3 oz. finely chopped ham 2/3 teaspoon curry powder 1 pt. Gold Medal flour 1 pt. boiling water 4 eggs Add the flour all at once to the boiling water and stir briskly until the mixture leaves the side of the pan. Take it from the fire and beat in the unbeaten eggs, one at a time. Stir in the ham and seasonings and fry in deep smoking fat, a dessert-spoon of the batter at a time. Fry a golden brown, drain on paper and garnish with parsley.
This is a savoury choux paste, deep-fried rather than baked, meant to float alongside a clear soup. Two things decide whether it works: how dry you cook the paste, and how hot the fat is.
- The hinge: dry the pasteAdd the flour to the boiling water all at once and keep stirring over heat until the mass pulls cleanly from the sides and films the bottom of the pan, a minute or two. Underdried paste absorbs fat and collapses; this is the whole reason for the step.
- Measure the flour by weightA pint of flour is two cups by volume, somewhere around 8 to 9 oz depending on how it was scooped and settled. Weighing out roughly 230-250 g will give a more consistent paste than measuring by the cup.
- Water and no butterA full pint of boiling water to a pint of flour is a wetter, leaner paste than modern pâte à choux, which carries butter. Expect a soft batter that drops from the spoon; if it runs rather than mounds, return it to the heat briefly to drive off more moisture.
- Eggs one at a timeThe paste must cool a few minutes before the first egg goes in or the egg will scramble. Beat each one in completely before adding the next -- the mixture will look broken partway through and then come back together.
- "Smoking fat" is too hotPeriod cooks judged fat by the first haze of smoke, which for most modern oils is well past the useful point. Hold the fat at 365-375F. Hotter and the outsides brown before the interior expands; cooler and the puffs soak.
- Fry in small batchesA dessert-spoon is about two teaspoons -- these are meant to be small. Add only enough at a time to keep the fat temperature up, and turn them so they colour evenly; they will roll themselves once they puff.
- Curry powderTwo-thirds of a teaspoon in this quantity is a faint background warmth by current tastes. Bloom it briefly in a little butter, or simply increase it, and add salt -- the original assumes the ham brings enough, which modern hams may not.
- Yield and servingThis makes a large batch: the paste runs to well over a pint, so several dozen small puffs. Puffs of this kind were dropped into consomme or passed with it, and they are best within minutes of draining.
Fried choux puffs of this kind travelled under a range of names in Anglo-American cookery -- beignets soufflés on the sweet side, and savoury versions studded with ham, cheese or grated Parmesan to be served with clear soup. It appears here in a flour-milling company's promotional cookbook, a paste cooked on the stovetop and raised by egg alone, with no leavening agent involved. The pairing with curry powder reflects how thoroughly the spice blend had been absorbed into American and British household cooking by then, used less as a signal of Indian food than as a general savoury seasoning for eggs, cream sauces and potted meats. Soup garnishes were a serious matter in the period's formal dinner service, where a course of consommé was expected to arrive with something crisp alongside it.