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Cream Cakes (Beat up one egg add to it half)
Beat up one egg, add to it half a cupful sugar, half a cupful flour, mixing thoroughly. While this is being done, put on the fire half a pint milk; when it boils, stir in the eggs, sugar, and flour mixture, then add a piece of butter, half the size of an egg. Stir all the time until it is of the desired consistency, which will be in a few minutes. When cold, add, and thoroughly mix, one and one-half teaspoonful vanilla.
For the cake; put one tumblerful of water to boil, and then add one-quarter pound butter; when melted, put in one and one-half tumblerful of flour. Stir in, mixing thoroughly, being careful not to burn it. It is sufficiently cooked by the time it is thoroughly mixed. Remove from the fire, and when cool, stir in five unbeaten eggs, mixing one at a time. It will then be the consistency of stiff paste. Drop on buttered tins, and bake in a quick oven fifteen or twenty minutes. Cut the side and insert the cream.--Mrs. H.M.
This is a cream puff — pâte à choux shells filled with a flour-thickened pastry cream. The method is sound, but the measurements are given in tumblers and the oven in adjectives.
- TumblerfulA tumbler in a Virginia kitchen of this period is an ordinary drinking glass, reckoned at about 8 fl oz. Read it as 1 cup water and 1½ cups flour for the paste.
- Half a pint milkOne cup. A quarter pound of butter is half a cup (1 stick); "a piece of butter half the size of an egg" is roughly 1 to 2 tablespoons, period usage for an egg-sized lump varying between about 2 tablespoons and a quarter cup.
- A quick ovenThe book gives no temperatures; 'quick oven' is usually read today as somewhere in the 400-450F range. Choux needs that initial blast to turn its water to steam and inflate the shell; fifteen to twenty minutes suits small puffs, though larger ones benefit from dropping the heat once they have risen and colored so the interiors dry out.
- Do not open the ovenThis is the hinge. The shells are held up by steam alone until the crust sets; a draft of cool air in the first ten minutes collapses them and no amount of further baking brings them back.
- Temper the custardThe instruction to "stir in the eggs, sugar, and flour mixture" when the milk boils will scramble the egg if dumped in at once. Add a ladle of hot milk to the egg mixture first, then return it all to the pan, and let it come to a full boil for a minute or two — the flour needs to boil out its raw taste and reach full thickening power.
- Cool the paste before the eggs"When cool" means warm, not cold: cool enough not to cook the eggs, but still warm to the touch. Cold paste will not absorb five eggs smoothly. Add them one at a time and stop when the paste falls from the spoon in a thick ribbon; depending on egg size you may not need all five.
- Cut the sideSlit each shell as soon as it comes from the oven so steam escapes, then let them dry before filling. Filled shells soften within a couple of hours, so assemble close to serving.
- YieldAbout 18 to 24 puffs of two-bite size, with enough pastry cream for all of them if the shells are kept small.
Cream cakes, cream puffs and "profiteroles" are close kin — a paste cooked on the stove before baking, whose origin is often traced, by tradition rather than documentation, to Italian and French court cooks of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and which was standardized in nineteenth-century Parisian pastry shops. By the time Marion Cabell Tyree collected Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1878), the technique had traveled into American household books as a showpiece a competent home cook could manage without special equipment: no mold, no ice, just a saucepan and a hot oven. The contributor's initials, "Mrs. H.M.," are typical of the book, which is a compilation of some 250 named Virginia housekeepers' receipts rather than one author's work, and the loose vessel-based measuring — tumblers, a lump of butter the size of half an egg — is characteristic of the period.