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Filling for Cream Puffs
1/2 pint milk. 1 tablespoon cornstarch. 3 egg yolks. 3 tablespoons sugar. 1 teaspoon vanilla.
Cook over hot water. Let cool and fill puffs. Split on sides. Add chocolate to this mixture to make a change; also pecans or hickory nuts.
This is a plain pastry cream — crème pâtissière — written in the shorthand Mrs. Wilson used when she expected the cook to know the method. A few numbers need translating and one step needs stating outright.
- Half a pint of milkOne cup, 8 fl oz. Whole milk gives the right body; skim milk sets thinly with this little starch.
- "Cook over hot water"A double boiler, or a heatproof bowl over a pan of simmering water. It is insurance against scrambling the yolks, at the cost of a slower cook and steady stirring for considerably longer than the same custard would need over direct heat.
- The hinge: cook the starch outThe custard must reach a full thickening, thick enough to hold a trail from the whisk, and be held there a minute or two rather than pulled off the moment it tightens. Yolks contain an enzyme that will thin a cornstarch custard back to soup if it is undercooked, and undercooked cornstarch tastes chalky.
- Temper the yolksWhisk the yolks with the sugar and cornstarch, then dribble in the hot milk while whisking before returning everything to the heat. Adding cold yolks to hot milk in one go leaves threads of cooked egg.
- Vanilla goes in lastOff the heat, once the custard has stopped steaming hard. Simmered vanilla loses most of its aroma.
- CoolingPress plastic wrap or buttered paper directly onto the surface, or it skins over and the skin shows up as lumps in the filled puff. Chill thoroughly; a warm filling will soften the shells.
- The variationsFor chocolate, melt 1-2 oz of chopped unsweetened or bittersweet chocolate into the hot custard and expect a stiffer set. Nuts should be toasted and chopped, then folded in cold, just before filling.
- YieldAbout 1 1/4 cups, which should fill roughly eight to ten puffs depending how large they are made. Fill them the same day they are eaten -- choux shells soften quickly once they meet a wet filling.
The filling is a standard pastry cream, the cornstarch-thickened egg custard that came to sit alongside and often displace older flour-thickened versions as refined cornstarch became cheap and widely available in American kitchens over the second half of the nineteenth century. Choux paste is traditionally credited to Italian pastry cooks in sixteenth-century France, and the modern piped forms to Parisian pâtissiers of the early nineteenth century, though both attributions are tradition rather than documented fact; by Mrs. Wilson's day the cream puff was thoroughly domesticated, a bakery item a careful home cook was expected to manage. The suggestion to stir in chocolate or "pecans or hickory nuts" is a distinctly American touch -- hickory nuts were more often gathered than bought.