Home › Puddings & Sauces › Cream Puffs
Cream Puffs
1 pint water. 2 oz. butter. 4 oz. Flora pastry flour. 4 eggs. Put water and butter over fire; when boiling, add quickly the flour; beat until smooth. Take from fire and let cool. Beat into this one egg at a time, mix and beat thoroughly. Drop by spoonful into a greased pan; bake in moderate oven forty minutes.
This is plain pâte à choux, written in the shorthand of a cook who already knew how it should look. Two things in the text need attention before you start: the water quantity and the oven handling.
- The water looks like a misprintThe water looks wrong against the other quantities -- four ounces of flour will not absorb a pint (two cups) of water into a paste stiff enough to hold a spoon. Choux in this proportion is normally made with about one cup of water to 4 oz flour and 4 eggs, so either the pint is a misprint or the flour and butter lines were halved. Treat the pint with suspicion rather than following it blindly.
- "Flora pastry flour"Most likely a proprietary flour name, though that cannot be confirmed from the recipe itself. Choux is generally better made with plain all-purpose flour: pastry flour is lower in protein and gives a weaker structure, so the puffs collapse more readily as they cool.
- Moderate ovenNo temperature is given; the term is conventionally read as somewhere around 350-375F. Many modern bakers start choux hotter, about 425F for the first 10-15 minutes to drive the initial steam, then drop to 350F to dry the shells. Forty minutes at a steady moderate heat will work for spoon-sized puffs but gives less lift.
- Dry the paste on the heatThe instruction to add flour to boiling water and beat until smooth omits the step that matters most: keep the pan on the fire for another minute or two, stirring, until the paste pulls into a ball and films the bottom of the pan. Undried paste makes flat, damp puffs.
- Cool before the eggs"Let cool" means to about hand-warm. Eggs beaten into a paste still near boiling will scramble. Add them one at a time and beat each in fully before the next; the finished paste should fall from the spoon in a thick ribbon.
- Do not open the ovenThe puffs rise on steam. Opening the door in the first two-thirds of the bake drops the temperature and sets them squat. They are done when deep gold and light in the hand; pierce each shell to let steam escape as they come out.
- YieldAbout 12 to 18 puffs from the corrected proportion, depending on spoon size. Fill only once completely cold.
Choux paste is cooked twice, once in the pan and once in the oven, and its lift comes largely from steam rather than from yeast or chemical leavening. Its invention is traditionally traced to Italian cooks in sixteenth-century France, with the paste refined and named in the following centuries; Antonin Careme is often credited with standardising the version pastry cooks still use, though that credit is conventional rather than documented. If the source is Mary A. Wilson, she was writing for American households around the First World War, by which time cream puffs were a common item in the domestic-science repertoire: cheap in ingredients and dramatic in result.