Home › Recipes › Cheese Curd Puffs
Cheese Curd Puffs
Cheesecakes. Petits Talmouses au Parmesan. 6 ounces of cream or milk curd. 1/2 pint of milk or water. 2 or 3 ounces of butter. 4 ounces of flour. 4 ounces of grated cheese. 6 eggs. Some pie paste for the bottoms.
Of these ingredients make a paste the same as for cream puffs, the curd and grated cheese to be pounded into it while hot. Roll out pie paste, the thinner the better; cut out flats with a biscuit cutter; place a teaspoonful of the paste in the middle of each, wet the edges and pinch them up in shape of a continental three-cornered hat, inclosing the curd paste within. Brush them over with egg and water and bake in a moderate oven about 15 minutes. They expand in baking and become hollow. May be filled with creamed cheese.
This is a choux paste enriched with fresh curd and grated cheese, spooned onto rounds of short pastry and pinched into three corners. Two things decide whether it works: the dryness of the curd and the willingness to bake the puffs longer than the original says.
- Drain the curd first"Cream or milk curd" is fresh unpressed curd — drained cottage cheese, farmer's cheese, fromage blanc or homemade curd from soured milk. Wet curd will slacken the paste past the point where it can hold a shape; press it in a sieve or cloth until it no longer weeps, then weigh out the 6 ounces.
- Weights and volumes1/2 pint is 1 cup. 4 ounces of flour is about 3/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons; 4 ounces of grated Parmesan is roughly 1 1/3 cups loosely packed. Butter at 2 to 3 ounces is 4 to 6 tablespoons.
- Add the eggs by feel, not by countSix eggs is generous for 4 ounces of flour, and the moisture in the curd counts as liquid too. Beat them in one at a time and stop when the paste falls from the spoon in a thick, slowly-dropping mass — you may need only four or five.
- "Pounded into it while hot"The curd and cheese go in while the panade is still hot from the pan, before the eggs. A food processor or a stand mixer does in seconds what the original expected of a mortar; work them in until no lumps of curd remain.
- Oven and time"A moderate oven" in books of this period is usually taken as somewhere around 350-375F; the book gives no temperature. Fifteen minutes may leave the inside damp, so be prepared to go longer, taking them out only when the pastry corners are properly browned and the puffs feel light. Opening the oven early collapses them.
- Pinching the cornersThe three-cornered hat holds only if the pastry rounds are thin and the edges genuinely sealed — wet them and press firmly. A teaspoon of paste per round is right; more and the filling forces the seams open as it expands.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; it depends on the cutter and how much paste goes on each round. They are best within an hour of baking; if they soften, five minutes in a low-to-moderate oven crisps them again.
- The name"Cheesecakes" in this book means small filled pastries, not a set custard cake. Do not expect anything resembling a modern cheesecake.
Talmouse is an old name in French pastry, recorded from the medieval period for a small cheese-filled tart pinched into a peaked or three-cornered shape. By the nineteenth century French pastry manuals commonly describe talmouses as a choux-paste preparation set on a base of short pastry, and that is the version this book transmits, with Parmesan in place of the fresh regional cheeses of earlier recipes. The fresh milk curd it calls for was an ordinary item in a period when dairies and households set their own, and it is the ingredient most likely to send a modern cook looking for a substitute.