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Cocoanut Puff Balls
Eclairs au caramel. Excellent for set tables, for ball or concert suppers, and not too common. It is extremely wrong, however, to thus sugar-coat colapsed, dumpy, or burnt-up failures of puffs, and try to pass them off as eclairs au caramel. The French never do that way, (we hope.) Make the desired number of cream puffs of whichever mixture you have the best success with.
They are not to be filled with anything. They should be small, light-baked, but dry, smooth and hollow, and either round or egg-shaped. Roll them, after baking, first in thick sugar syrup and then in grated cocoanut mixed with granulated sugar on a plate. Dry the puffs in a warm place, that they may not be sticky when served.
To make the syrup, pour half a cup of water on a pound of white sugar, and let it boil up without stirring. Chopped almonds can be used as well as cocoanut. Eclairs aux Confitures.
Sweet cream puffs variously shaped and filled with fruit jelly, conserve, or any kind of sweetmeat. 1 pint of water. 7 ounces of butter. 3 ounces of sugar. 10 ounces of flour. 6 or 7 eggs. 1 tablespoonful of vanilla extract.
Boil the water with the sugar and butter in it, then stir in the flour and make the paste as directed for the preceding varieties. Fancy shapes are made of this paste by using a lady-finger sack and tubes, to form fingers, crescents, etc., and egging and sugaring them before baking.
Three things share this entry: a coconut-coated puff, a note on filled puffs, and one bakery-scale choux paste that serves them all. The paste is the part that needs translating.
- Scale of the pasteA pint of water with 7 oz butter, 10 oz flour and 6-7 eggs is a professional batch that will give roughly 40 to 50 small puffs. Halve or quarter it for home use; the proportions hold.
- Weigh the flourTen ounces is about 2 1/4 cups of all-purpose flour, but choux is unforgiving of a heavy cup. Use a scale, and hold back the last egg until you see whether the paste falls from the spoon in a slow, glossy V.
- Oven heatChoux wants a hot start and a dry finish: 425F for the first 10-15 minutes to drive the steam and lift the shell, then down to 350F until the puffs are firm and deep gold. "Light-baked, but dry" is misleading to modern ears better underbaked-looking than actually damp, since a pale puff collapses as it cools.
- Hollow, not filledThe caramel-and-coconut version is deliberately empty. Split one open after baking to check that the inside is webbed and dry; if the walls are custardy, return the tray to a 325F oven with the door propped for another five to ten minutes.
- The syrupA pound of sugar to half a cup of water, boiled without stirring, comes up quickly to the thread and then the soft-ball range. Around 235-240F on a thermometer gives a coating that sets rather than soaks. Work fast, and do not stir once it boils or it will grain.
- CocoanutMost likely fresh coconut, grated, which is moist and coarse, though packaged desiccated coconut was also available by this period. Unsweetened desiccated or frozen grated coconut is the nearest thing; sweetened flake will be cloying against a sugar syrup already at full strength.
- Lady-finger sack and tubesA piping bag with plain round tips. "Egging and sugaring" is an egg wash brushed on before baking with sugar scattered over.
- Drying and holdingThe warm place for drying can be an oven that has been turned off and left to fall to about 150F. Coated puffs are best the day they are made; the syrup pulls moisture from the air and softens the shell overnight.
Choux paste in what appears to be an American bakery manual of this period is treated as a workhorse rather than a showpiece one paste, piped into rounds, fingers or crescents, then finished a dozen different ways depending on what the counter needed that morning. The author's small tirade about sugar-coating "colapsed, dumpy, or burnt-up failures" and selling them as eclairs au caramel is the most revealing line here: French names appear to have carried a premium in American pastry shops of the period, and the temptation to attach one to a tray of seconds was clearly real. Eclairs aux confitures simply means eclairs with preserves. The spelling "cocoanut" was standard in American cookbooks well into the twentieth century, and grated coconut may often have meant a fresh nut cracked and grated in the shop, though packaged desiccated coconut was commercially sold in the United States from the 1880s.