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Cream Cakes
1/2 cup butter 1 cup boiling water 4 eggs 1 cup flour Pour butter and water in saucepan and place on front of range. As soon as boiling-point is reached, add flour all at once, and stir vigorously. Remove from fire as soon as mixed, and add unbeaten eggs one at a time, beating, until thoroughly mixed, between the addition of eggs. Drop by spoonfuls on a buttered sheet, one and one-half inches apart, shaping with handle of spoon as nearly circular as possible, having mixture slightly piled in centre. Bake thirty minutes in a moderate oven. With a sharp knife make a cut in each large enough to admit of Cream Filling. This recipe makes eighteen small cream cakes. For flavoring cream filling use lemon extract. If cream cakes are removed from oven before being thoroughly cooked, they will fall. If in doubt, take one from oven, and if it does not fall, this is sufficient proof that others are cooked.
This is pâte à choux under its old American name. The method is sound and needs almost no adjustment, but a few of the directions assume a coal range and a cook who knows what the filling is.
- The hinge: bake it dryUnderbaked choux collapses as it cools, which is exactly what the last two sentences warn about. Take the puffs to a deep golden brown and a hollow, crisp shell; the sacrificial test puff is still the most reliable check.
- Oven temperatureA moderate oven here is 350-375F. Many bakers now start at 425F for the first 10-12 minutes to force the steam that lifts the puff, then drop to 350F for the remaining 20 minutes or so. Either way, keep the door shut for the first two-thirds of the bake.
- "Front of range"On a coal range the front, nearest the firebox, was generally the hotter part of the top. Use medium-high heat on the stovetop, and bring the butter and water fully to a rolling boil before the flour goes in.
- Drying the pasteThe recipe says to remove it from the fire as soon as mixed. It is worth stirring the dough over heat another minute or two until it pulls cleanly from the pan and leaves a thin film on the bottom; drier paste takes more egg and rises higher.
- Egg by eggLet the paste cool for a few minutes before the first egg, or it will scramble. The dough breaks into a slippery mess with each addition and comes back together with beating. Four eggs is right for most flour, but stop when the paste falls from the spoon in a thick ribbon; a fifth egg is occasionally needed and one egg too many will not hold its shape.
- Spacing and shapingAn inch and a half apart is tight for puffs that will triple. Give them two inches on a parchment-lined sheet. A piping bag does the same job as the spoon handle with less fuss.
- The cream fillingThe filling is a separate recipe elsewhere in the same book, a starch-thickened pastry cream. Any standard vanilla pastry cream works; the lemon extract called for here is easily swapped for vanilla.
- YieldEighteen small puffs, as stated. Split and fill them the day they are baked, or the shells will soften; unfilled shells keep a day in a tin and can be crisped for a few minutes in a 300F oven.
"Cream cakes" was the ordinary American name in the late nineteenth century for what French kitchens called choux à la crème and what most people now call cream puffs. The paste itself is generally traced to sixteenth-century Italian cooks working in France, with the name usually attributed to Pantarelli or Popelini in the court of Catherine de' Medici, though the attribution is traditional rather than documented; the technique in its modern form belongs to the professional French pastry kitchens of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Its appearance in a domestic manual, worked out in cups and spoonfuls and with a homely test for doneness, shows how thoroughly the cooking-school movement had transferred pastry work from the confectioner's shop to the household range.