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Calumet Cream Puffs
1/2 cup butter 1 cup boiling water. 1 cup flour 4 eggs Place butter and water in saucepan on range, as soon as it boils add flour all at once until well mixed; stir until it forms a ball and leaves the sides of pan. Set off to cool (not cold), add 1 egg, beat 5 minutes, another egg and beat 5 minutes and so on until eggs are all used up in batter. Drop mixture on oiled, shallow pan, bake in moderate oven 40 or 50 minutes. When cool make incision and fill with whipped cream or cream filling. (This should make 15 puffs.) (See illustration, page 61.) 3 tablespoons sugar 1½ cups milk 2 tablespoons cornstarch 2 tablespoons flour Cream Filling 1 tablespoon butter 1/4 teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon vanilla I whole egg Mix flour, cornstarch and sugar, add to well beaten egg. Pour on the milk, heated to a scald. Return to double boiler and cook until thick, add extract, let cool and fill cream puffs.
This is standard pâte à choux with a cornstarch pastry cream, written in the compressed style of a baking-powder company pamphlet. The ingredient list for the puffs themselves has lost its butter and water quantities; the usual proportion for 1 cup flour and 4 eggs is 1 cup water and 1/2 cup butter.
- The hingeThe paste must be cooked on the heat until it pulls into a ball and films the bottom of the pan. That step drives off water and gelatinizes the starch; skip it and the puffs will not have the structure to hold their steam-blown cavity.
- Cool before the eggs"Set off to cool (not cold)" means warm to the touch but not hot enough to scramble the first egg. Add the eggs one at a time and beat each in completely before the next; the five minutes of hand beating called for takes correspondingly less time with a stand mixer.
- OvenThe book gives no temperatures; a moderate oven of this period is usually read as roughly 350-375F. Some modern bakers start hotter for the first 10-15 minutes to force the rise, then drop the heat for the remainder. Forty to fifty minutes suits large puffs, and they must be deeply browned and light in the hand or they will collapse.
- Do not open the doorThe puffs set on escaping steam. Opening the oven in the first two-thirds of the bake drops the temperature and deflates them permanently.
- "Oiled, shallow pan"A rimmed sheet pan, greased. Parchment works better and needs no grease. Space the mounds well apart; fifteen puffs from this quantity means mounds of roughly two to three tablespoons each.
- Vent themPierce each puff as it comes from the oven, or return them to a turned-off oven for a few minutes with the door ajar, so trapped steam escapes and the interiors dry.
- The fillingCombine the dry ingredients with the egg first, then temper with the scalded milk as directed. Cooked over a double boiler it will take 10-15 minutes to thicken; a heavy saucepan over direct low heat, whisked constantly, does it in about half that. Add the vanilla off the heat.
- Fill lateFilled puffs soften within a couple of hours. Bake and fill the same day, and refrigerate anything with cream filling in it.
Reliable Recipes was published by the Calumet Baking Powder Company of Chicago as advertising, and its recipes carry the brand name whether or not the product is essential — as here, since choux paste is leavened entirely by steam and needs no chemical leavening at all. The paste itself is much older than the pamphlet: it is traditionally said to have originated in sixteenth-century Italian and French court kitchens, though the story is more folk tradition than documented fact, and the puff form was well established in American cookbooks by the 1880s. The cornstarch-thickened filling here may reflect a period economy, being cheaper and more stable in a warm kitchen than a filling bound with egg yolks alone, though that reading is a surmise.