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Cream Puffs (T butter heaping eggs Put)
1 C flour 1 C water 1 T butter (heaping) 4 eggs Put water and butter over fire and when boiling stir in flour. Let cool. Stir in eggs, one at a time, and stir until each is well mixed. Bake in gem tins in a hot oven 35 or 40 minutes. Fill with custard or whipped cream.
Mrs. V. L. Gerred.
This is choux paste — the same dough behind éclairs and profiteroles — set down in the compressed shorthand of a church cookbook where the writer assumed you already knew the proportions. The quantities of water and flour have not survived in this entry, so treat the method as the useful part.
- Missing amountsOnly the butter and eggs are given, and one heaping tablespoon of butter is far too little for four eggs. Standard choux for four eggs runs about 1 cup water, 1/2 cup (8 T) butter and 1 cup flour; use a current recipe for the proportions and follow the technique below.
- "Gem tins"Gem pans are the cast-iron ancestors of the muffin tin. A modern muffin tin works, though most bakers now pipe or spoon mounds onto a flat parchment-lined sheet so the puffs can expand freely and dry out on all sides.
- "A hot oven"Read that as 425-450F. Many bakers start at 425F for the first 15 minutes to drive the steam that lifts the shells, then drop to 350F for the remainder so the interiors dry without the outsides scorching.
- The hinge: let it coolThe instruction to let the paste cool before the eggs go in is the one step people skip. Added to hot paste the eggs scramble, and the dough loses the elastic structure that traps steam. Cool to warm — comfortable to the back of a finger — then beat in the eggs one at a time.
- Cook the flour pasteAfter stirring the flour into the boiling water and butter, keep it over the heat and beat until it forms a smooth ball that pulls from the pan sides, a minute or two. This gelatinizes the starch and dries the paste enough to absorb all four eggs.
- Baking time and the doorThirty-five to forty minutes is right for large puffs; smaller ones need 25-30. Do not open the oven during the first two-thirds of the bake. Pull them when deeply browned and light, not merely risen, or they will collapse.
- FillingFill only once completely cool, and fill close to serving. Pastry cream and whipped cream both soften the shells within a few hours; refrigerate anything filled with either.
- YieldA four-egg batch gives roughly 12 large puffs or about 24 small ones.
Choux paste reached American home cooks through nineteenth-century pastry manuals and cooking schools, and in compilations of this kind it appears thoroughly domesticated - the French names dropped, the puffs baked in whatever gem pans were already in the kitchen, the filling left to the cook's discretion between custard and sweetened cream. The dough is unusual among cakes and cookies in using no chemical leavening: it rises on the steam generated inside a starch-and-egg shell, which is consistent with the insistence on a hot oven here and the absence of any mention of baking powder. Community cookbooks of this sort, with entries signed by contributors' married names, are often said to have been compiled and sold by congregations and societies to raise money.