Nun's Puffs
Boil one pint of milk with half a pound of butter. Stir them into three-quarters of a pound of flour and let them cool. Then add nine eggs, yolks and whites to be beaten separately, and whites to be added last. Fill cups or tins half full and bake. When done, sprinkle with white sugar while hot. Very nice for tea.--Mrs. A. D.
Miscellaneous Flour Breads.
This is essentially a cream-puff paste enriched to bread-like richness and baked in cups, closer to a popover than a cake. The original gives no oven temperature and no baking time, so the numbers below are the ones that matter.
- The weights in cupsOne pint of milk is 2 cups. Half a pound of butter is 2 sticks (1 cup). Three-quarters of a pound of flour is about 3 cups, or 340 g — weigh it if you can, since scooped flour can vary considerably in weight and this batter depends on the ratio.
- Cook the paste, do not just stir itThe instruction to "stir them into" the flour reads as off-heat mixing, but the puff comes from gelatinized starch holding steam. Add the flour to the boiling milk and butter all at once and beat over the heat for a minute or two until the mass pulls from the pan sides.
- Let it cool properly"Let them cool" means to about body temperature. Nine eggs added to hot paste will scramble, and the batter will never climb.
- Nine eggs is a lot of eggEggs of the period were often smaller than today's large, so eight large eggs is a reasonable modern starting point; add the last one only if the paste is still stiff enough to hold a soft peak on the spoon.
- Separated whitesBeating the whites apart and folding them in last is the older lift technique and it does lighten the crumb. Fold in thirds and stop while streaks are just gone; overworking loses the air you went to the trouble of whipping in.
- OvenStart hot, 425F, for about 15 minutes to force the rise, then drop to 350F for another 15 to 20 minutes until deeply browned and firm to the tap. Do not open the door during the first stage.
- Pans and fillingDeep muffin or popover tins, well greased, filled no more than half as directed — they roughly triple. Bake in the upper third of the oven.
- Yield and servingAbout 18 to 24 puffs depending on cup size. The sugar must go on hot so it clings; they collapse and go leathery within the hour, so serve them straight from the oven as the "for tea" note intends.
Recipes titled "Nun's Puffs" turn up in nineteenth-century American books for light egg-and-butter pastes of this kind, and the name is often said to point to convent kitchens, though the connection is traditional rather than documented. Whatever the origin of the label, the technique is plainly the choux paste of French cookery, absorbed into the American tea table and filed here under "Miscellaneous Flour Breads" rather than among the cakes. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879) was assembled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by named Virginia housekeepers, and the attribution to "Mrs. A. D." is typical of the book's method: household recipes traded among a circle of women, printed with the sparse directions of a cook writing for others who already knew what a hot oven felt like.