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Chou Paste
Put a saucepan with half a cup of butter and one cup of boiling water over the fire. When the mixture boils, beat into it one cup of flour. When the dough cleaves from the sides of the saucepan, turn into a bowl and beat in, one at a time, three large or four small eggs.
To Boil Salted Meats: Ham, Tongue, Etc.
Cover the meat with cold water and bring the water slowly to the boiling-point; let boil five minutes, then slightly bubble until the meat is tender.
This is pâte à choux under its older English spelling, given here so that small puffs can be split and filled with salad mixtures. The book prints it without a baking temperature, and a stray note on boiling salted meats has been set in the same paragraph.
- The hinge: dry the paste before the eggsOnce the flour is beaten in, keep the pan on the heat and stir until the mass forms a smooth ball that pulls cleanly from the sides and films the pan bottom. Underdried paste carries too much water and the puffs collapse as they cool.
- Let it cool before the eggs go inTurning the dough into a bowl, as directed, is not a formality; it drops the temperature. Add each egg only when the previous one has disappeared, and stop when the paste falls from the spoon in a thick, glossy V.
- Egg quantity is elasticThree large or four small eggs is a range, not a rule, because flours absorb differently. Beat the last egg in a little at a time and hold some back if the paste is already slack.
- MeasurementsHalf a cup of butter is 4 oz (115 g); one cup of flour is roughly 4 to 4.5 oz (115-130 g) by modern scoop. The recipe calls for no salt at all; if using unsalted butter, a pinch may be wanted.
- Oven, since none is givenBake the piped puffs at 425F for about 15 minutes to get the lift, then drop to 350F for another 15 to 20 until they are firm, dry and deeply colored. Opening the oven early is what flattens them.
- Dry the insidesPierce each puff with a skewer as it comes out and return it to the turned-off oven for a few minutes. Damp interiors go soggy the moment a salad filling touches them.
- YieldThis quantity makes roughly two to three dozen small puffs, depending on how small they are piped, or about a dozen large ones.
- The boiled-meat note is a separate entryThe sentences about ham and tongue belong to another recipe and were run together in the printing. They have nothing to do with the paste.
Chou paste, now usually written choux, is traditionally said to take its name from the French for cabbage, the small round puffs being thought to resemble little cabbages. The making of the dough is unusual among pastries in that the flour is cooked in boiling liquid before any egg is added, so that steam rather than a raising agent does the lifting; the technique is generally traced to Italian and French court cookery of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and was long attributed by tradition to a cook named Popelini, though the attribution is not documented. Around the turn of the century such small unsweetened puffs were sometimes split and filled with chicken, lobster or egg salad in place of bread, though how widespread that fashion was is not clear.