Cream Puffs
5 eggs 1 tablespoon sugar + teaspoon salt Boil sugar, water and butter one minute; add flour all When mixture leaves side of the pan in a mass, add eggs, one at a time, beating thoroughly. When all eggs are used, beat five minutes; drop from tip of tablespoon on to a buttered sheet and bake one half hour in quick oven. Fill with cream filling, strawberry filling, chocolate filling, or whipped cream.
Éclairs Use rule for Cream Puffs. Put mixture in pastry bag or shape in strips three and one half inches long and one inch wide, on buttered sheet. Bake twenty to thirty minutes in quick oven.
Fill with cream, chocolate, coffee, or strawberry filling, and brush tops with melted fondant, chocolate frosting, or confectioners' frosting. 6 eggs cup powdered sugar 1 cup flour
This is standard pâte à choux, but the transcription has lost most of the ingredient column — the water, butter and flour quantities are gone, and a stray list belonging to another recipe (6 eggs, powdered sugar, 1 cup flour) has been swept in at the end. Treat the method as the useful part.
- Missing quantitiesAs printed, the recipe gives only 5 eggs, 1 tablespoon sugar, and a salt measure whose fraction has been lost in transcription. The water, butter and flour amounts are absent, so the ingredient list cannot be reconstructed from this page with any confidence. The conventional period proportion for five eggs is roughly a cup of liquid, half a cup of butter and a cup of flour, but that is inference, not what the book says.
- Quick ovenA quick oven in a book of this vintage is usually reckoned at roughly 400-450F. Puffs want the high heat at the start to throw steam and inflate; modern practice is often to drop to about 350F for the last third of the bake to dry the shells without scorching, though the book gives no such instruction.
- "Leaves the side of the pan in a mass"This is the hinge. The flour paste must be cooked and stirred over heat until it balls up and films the pan bottom, driving off water. Underdone paste makes flat, damp puffs no amount of beating will save.
- Cool before the eggsThe book says nothing about temperature, but eggs beaten into paste still near boiling will scramble. Let it stand a few minutes, then add eggs one at a time and beat each in fully before the next.
- Beating five minutesSensible advice for a wooden spoon and a strong arm. A stand mixer with the paddle does the same work in two to three minutes on medium; the finish you want is a glossy paste that falls from the spoon in a thick, slowly-breaking ribbon.
- Don't open the ovenNot mentioned in the original and worth knowing: a draught during the first twenty minutes collapses the shells. Bake the full half hour, then pierce each puff to let steam escape so they stay crisp.
- Filling and yieldFill only once the shells are completely cold, or the custard weeps and the walls soften. Yield cannot be worked out from this page, since the flour, butter and water quantities are missing and no puff size is given.
- Fondant glazeMelted fondant for éclair tops means poured or rolled fondant warmed gently to just spreadable — around 100F. Overheated fondant loses its shine and sets grainy.
Choux paste — cooked flour paste inflated by its own steam — is generally traced to sixteenth-century Italian and French court cookery, and by the nineteenth century the puff and the éclair were fixtures of the professional pastry counter. Their appearance in Lowney's Cook Book is commercial as much as culinary: the book was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and pages like this one exist partly to send the home cook toward chocolate filling and chocolate frosting. The word éclair means lightning, a name usually explained by how fast the things are eaten, though that story is traditional rather than documented. What the recipe really reflects is a period when American housekeepers were being handed techniques straight out of the pastry shop, pastry bag and all, on the assumption they now had a reliable oven to bake them in.