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Choux Pastry
2 ozs. (2 heaping tablespoonfuls) butter 4 large eggs 1/4 teaspoonful salt 1/2 pint (I cup) water ¼ lb. (1 cup) flour Put the butter into a fireproof dish, add the water, bring to the boiling point, quickly add the flour and salt, stir well with a wooden spoon until the mixture leaves the sides of the pan, remove from the fire, allow to cool, but not become cold; add the eggs, beating each one in thoroughly.
Set away in a cool place for one hour.
Put into a forcing bag with a plain tube and force on to a greased baking tin into small rounds; brush over with beaten egg, and bakein a hot oven for half an hour. When cold, split them open at one side and fill them with whipped cream sweetened and flavored to taste.
The mixture may be forced in small pieces into a pan of smoking hot fat and fried like doughnuts.
They should then be sprinkled over with sugar.
A standard choux paste, written for a cook who already knows what the dough should look like. The proportions are sound; only the vessels, the oven language and the resting instruction need translating.
- Flour quantityThe flour is given as "1 cup" alongside a weight that has lost its fraction. One cup of flour is 1/4 lb, about 4 to 4 1/2 oz (125 g), and that is the correct amount against 1 cup of water and 4 eggs.
- "Fireproof dish" means a saucepanThe recipe brings the butter and water to the boil in it, so it is a flameproof vessel used directly on the fire, not a baking dish. Use a heavy saucepan with room to beat the paste vigorously.
- Half a pint of waterThe recipe glosses it as 1 cup, so read the pint as the US 16 oz pint: 8 fl oz / 240 ml of water to 2 oz butter.
- A hot oven"Hot" in books of this period is conventionally somewhere in the 400 to 425F range. The recipe asks for half an hour; if you drop the heat partway so the shells dry rather than colour further, keep the total close to that half hour.
- The hinge: cool, then eggs"Allow to cool, but not become cold" is the whole trick. Beat the paste until it stops steaming heavily and is warm rather than hot -- around 140F is the usual guide -- then add the eggs one at a time. Too hot and the eggs scramble; too cold and the paste will not take them smoothly.
- Egg by feel, not by countBeat in the last egg a little at a time and stop when the paste falls from the spoon in a thick ribbon and a piped ridge holds its shape.
- The hour in a cool placeMuch modern practice pipes and bakes at once. If you do rest the paste, keep it covered so it does not skin, and let it come back toward room temperature before piping.
- Forcing bagA piping bag with a plain round tube, roughly 1/2 inch. Pipe mounds about 1 1/2 inches across, well spaced, and flatten any peaks with a wet fingertip before the egg wash.
- Drying the shellsOnce baked, pierce or split each shell and return it to a turned-off oven for a few minutes. Filling a damp shell with cream collapses it.
- YieldAbout 24 small puffs, or a little over 30 fried pieces. Fry at 360 to 375F if you take the second route.
Choux paste is unusual among pastries: it is cooked in two stages, first on the stove and then in the oven, and it is leavened by nothing but the steam raised inside it. Tradition, rather than documentation, traces it to an Italian cook in French service, and the name is usually explained by the cabbage-like shape of the little baked mounds, choux. Its appearance in a book on casserole cookery is not as strange as it looks: the first stage demands a flameproof pot that can go straight over the fire and take hard beating, exactly the sort of vessel these books were promoting. The closing note, that the same paste can be dropped into smoking fat and rolled in sugar, saved a cook with no reliable oven from having to give the dish up.