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Cream for Puffs
1 cup milk 1/2 cup sugar 1 egg 4 tablespoons flour 1 teaspoon vanilla Put the milk on to boil in a double boiler. Beat the egg with the sugar; add the flour; stir all into the boiling milk. Stir over the fire until the mixture thickens; when cool add the vanilla.
This is a plain pastry cream — crème pâtissière with flour rather than cornstarch as the thickener. The recipe assumes a cook who already knows what a finished custard looks like, so the two things worth watching are the raw-flour taste and the lumps.
- The hinge: cook the flour outOnce the mixture thickens it needs several more minutes over the water, stirring, or the cream tastes chalky and raw. Flour-thickened creams need longer cooking than cornstarch ones; a double boiler makes this slow but forgiving.
- Temper, or strainStirring a cold egg-sugar-flour mixture straight into boiling milk will set lumps at the point of contact. Whisk a ladle of the hot milk into the egg mixture first, then return it all to the pot. If lumps form anyway, push the finished cream through a sieve while hot.
- "Boil in a double boiler"The milk in the upper pan will scald rather than truly boil — the water beneath boils. Scalded milk, steaming with bubbles at the rim, is what is wanted.
- Four tablespoons of flourThat is a quarter cup, giving a stiff cream that holds its shape in a puff rather than running out. If it is being used as a sauce or a thinner filling, three tablespoons is enough.
- Vanilla off the heatThe instruction to add it when cool is deliberate, not fussiness: alcohol-based extract loses aroma in a hot pot. Warm, not hot, is close enough.
- Cooling and skinPress plastic wrap or buttered paper directly onto the surface as it cools, or a skin forms and breaks up into rubbery flecks when the cream is beaten smooth.
- Yield and keepingSomething over a cup; with the sugar dissolved into the milk the finished cream comes nearer a cup and a half, enough for a batch of medium puffs or eclairs. It is an egg-and-milk custard: refrigerate, and use within two days. Fill puffs shortly before serving or the shells soften.
Cream puffs came into American home cooking through French patisserie, and the filling here is the standard creme patissiere reduced to its plainest workable form -- one egg, no butter, flour rather than cornstarch. Cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries often split the two halves of the dish into separate entries, one for the choux paste and one for the cream, on the assumption that a cook would want the custard for other uses as well: layer cakes, tarts, boiled pies. The terseness of entries like this one fits that: the technique was assumed, only the proportions needed writing down.