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Boston Cream Cakes
2 cups of flour. 2.1/2 cups of water. 1 cup of butter. 5 eggs. Boil the butter and water together, stir in the flour while boiling; after it is cool, add the eggs, well beaten. Put a large spoonful in muffin rings, and bake twenty minutes in a hot oven.
The cream for them is made as follows:
Put over the fire one cup of milk and not quite a cup of sugar, one egg, mixed with three teaspoonfuls of corn starch and one tablespoonful of butter. Boil a few moments only. When cool, add vanilla to the taste. Open the cakes and fill them with this cream.--M.H.K.
This is choux pastry under a nineteenth-century American name, filled with a cornstarch pastry cream. Most of it works as written; the liquid ratio does not.
- The ratio is offStandard choux runs roughly equal volumes of water and flour. Here 2 cups flour is paired with 2 1/2 cups water and 1 cup butter, which gives a paste too slack to hold a shape. Use 2 cups water, or increase the flour to about 2 1/2 cups, and judge by texture: the cooked paste should pull away from the pan in a smooth ball.
- Eggs, and how manyFive eggs is on the low side for this quantity of flour. Beat them in one at a time and stop when the paste falls from the spoon in a thick, glossy ribbon rather than dropping in a lump. You may want six or seven modern large eggs, or fewer than five if your paste is already loose.
- "After it is cool"Fully cold paste is stiff and hard to work. Let it drop to warm-to-the-touch, around 140F, before adding egg; hot paste will scramble it, cold paste will not absorb it smoothly.
- Hot oven425-450F. A high initial heat is what turns the water in the paste to steam and inflates the shells. Dropping to 350F after about 15 minutes lets them dry out without scorching.
- Twenty minutes is not enoughPuffs of the size a large spoonful makes need 30 to 35 minutes total. Pull them early and they collapse. They should be deeply browned and sound hollow; a small slit in each at the end of baking lets the interior steam escape.
- Muffin ringsMetal rings set on a greased baking sheet, an item most kitchens no longer keep. Spoon or pipe mounds directly onto a parchment-lined sheet, spaced two inches apart.
- The creamWhisk the cornstarch and egg into a little of the cold milk first, then add to the hot milk, or the egg will set in threads. Cornstarch needs to reach a full boil for a minute to thicken properly and to inactivate the enzyme in the yolk that would otherwise thin it as it cools.
- YieldAbout 18 puffs, with cream to fill them. Fill on the day they are baked; the shells soften quickly once the cream goes in.
"Boston cream cakes" was a common American name in the second half of the nineteenth century for what French cooks called profiteroles or choux — the paste cooked on the stove, dried in the oven, and split to take a boiled custard. Like Boston cream pie, it takes a filling thickened with cornstarch and egg rather than whipped or clotted cream; cornstarch was manufactured and sold in the United States from the mid-1840s onward, though how the "Boston" name attached to either dish is not documented. Marion Cabell Tyree's Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1878) was assembled from contributions by named and initialed Virginia housewives, and the "--M.H.K." here marks one of them.