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Cream Puffs (T salt eggs Place water)
1/2 C butter 1 C boiling water 14 t salt 3 eggs Place water and butter in pan, heat to boiling point, add ficur all at once and stir until smooth. Cook until paste comes away from sides of pan. Remove from fire and when cold add unbeaten eggs, one at a time, beating thoroughly after each egg is added. The mixture should be stiff enough to hold its shape without spreading. Drop by spoonful on buttered pan and bake about 35 minutes in a hot oven. 1 C milk ½ C sugar 1 egg 1 T butter Cream Puff Filling 14 t salt 2 T cornstarch 1 t vanilla Mix sugar, salt, cornstarch. Gradually add milk and egg. Cook until very thick and add butter and vanilla. Beat and when cold split puffs and fill. Strawberries, pineapple or most any kind of fruit may be added. Whipped cream is delicious as filling.
Ruby Gorsline. 1 C flour 1 C water
A standard pâte à choux with a cornstarch pastry cream, printed with its ingredient lists scrambled by the typesetter and the scanner. The quantities need reassembling before you start.
- The garbled measurements"14 t salt" is ¼ teaspoon and "ficur" is flour. The puff paste is 1 cup water, 1 cup flour, 3 eggs, ¼ teaspoon salt — but the butter quantity never appears in the printed text. Choux of this size normally takes ½ cup (1 stick) butter.
- Sugar in the fillingThe filling takes half a cup of sugar to a cup of milk, which is the standard proportion for a cornstarch cream filling of this size. Anything approaching a cup and a half would set up as candy rather than a filling.
- Hot oven"hot" in cookbooks of this kind generally means somewhere around 400–450°F. Start high for the first 15 minutes to drive the steam that lifts the puffs, then drop to 350°F for the remaining time so they dry out without scorching.
- Do not add eggs cold"when cold add unbeaten eggs" overstates it. Let the paste cool only until it stops steaming and is warm to the touch; if it is fully cold the eggs are harder to work in smoothly.
- Judge by the paste, not the countThree eggs is a starting point. Add the last one in stages and stop when the paste falls from the spoon in a thick ribbon and holds a peak; flour behaves differently from one milling to another.
- Don't open the ovenThe recipe says 35 minutes, which is right for large puffs, but they collapse if the oven is opened early. Bake until deeply golden and firm, then pierce each one to vent steam and return them to a turned-off oven to dry.
- Tempering the eggThe filling has you add milk and egg to the dry mix together, which works if you whisk constantly over moderate heat. Cook until it bubbles and thickens fully — undercooked cornstarch keeps a raw, chalky taste and will thin out later.
- YieldAbout 12 large puffs or 24 small ones. The filling makes roughly 1½ cups, enough for a dozen; double it if you split them generously or fold in fruit.
Cream puffs appear in American church and club cookbooks made from the same paste — pâte à choux, cooked on the stove before it is baked — that also produces éclairs and profiteroles. Its appearance in a Presbyterian congregational collection under "Cookies-Doughnuts" is at least a curiosity of how these books were organized, whatever the reason a puff ended up beside a doughnut. The cornstarch filling is the frugal domestic version of pastry cream, thickened with starch rather than a large number of yolks, and the closing note that whipped cream or fruit "may be added" is the signature of a contributor recipe: Ruby Gorsline expected her readers to know the frame and improvise inside it.