Cream Puffs
Boston cream puffs of the baker's shops. Eclairs a la creme, Profitiolles, Petits--choux, etc. 1 pint of water. 1/2 pound of lard or butter. 1/2 pound of flour. 10 eggs. Little salt.
Bring the water to a boil with the lard and salt in it. Put in the flour all at once, and stir the mixture over the fire about five minutes, or till it becomes a stiff paste. Then take it off and beat in the eggs one at a time. Drop small spoonfuls of the paste on baking sheets very slightly greased, allowing an inch or more of space between them, and bake in a moderate oven about 20 minutes. Cut a slit in the side and fill the puffs with pastry cream. Makes 40 to To the best bakers who make them in large quantities daily, there is nothing easier than cream puffs, but it is not the less true that they are "mighty uncertain" where made only occasionally and baked in the uneven heat of a cooking range, instead of an oven.
A very ordinary workman, 1 once knew, traveled as a first-class pastry cook from town to town on the strength of a knack he had of making these trifles in greater perfection than anybody else. It was his one trick, but it stood him in good stead for short spells.
The more the paste is beaten up against the side of the pan as the eggs are added, and after, the more the puffs will expand in baking. When they are perfect they are nearly smooth and look like small cauliflowers, whence, perhaps, comes one of their French names. To make them so, the paste must be almost soft enough to run out of shape on the pans; another egg may be required.
It is safer to use a little less lard or butter and a little more flour than the receipt, for a first trial.
The puffs will not rise at all if the paste be allowed to become cold before the eggs are beaten into it.
The handsomest puffs are those baked done without the oven door ever being opened in the meantime.
This is pâte à choux under several of its nineteenth-century American names, written for a baker working by the pint and the half-pound. The proportions are workable but slack, and the author's own hedges in the closing paragraph are worth taking seriously.
- The hinge: add the eggs while the paste is hotThe text says it outright and it is the single thing that decides the batch: the puffs will not rise at all if the paste cools before the eggs go in. Beat them in one at a time, hard, against the side of the pan while the paste is still steaming; each addition should be fully absorbed before the next.
- Weigh the flourHalf a pound of flour is about 1 3/4 cups, and a pint of water is 2 cups. That is a wetter, flour-lean ratio compared with many modern choux formulas, which may be why the author advises a little less fat and a little more flour on a first attempt. Drying the paste over the fire for the full five minutes matters here — you are boiling water off.
- Ten eggs is a ceiling, not a quantityEggs of the period were not graded as they are now and may well have run smaller than today's large eggs. Add them one at a time and stop when the paste falls from the spoon in a thick ribbon and just barely holds its shape on the sheet — you may need eight, you may need eleven. The author's test is the right one: almost soft enough to run.
- Moderate oven"Moderate" is undefined here; it is usually read as somewhere around 350°F. Many bakers now start choux hotter, around 400–425°F, to force the steam rise before setting the shell; either way the 20 minutes is a minimum for small puffs and they should be deep gold and light in the hand before they come out.
- Do not open the doorNot decorative advice. Choux is raised by steam alone, and a draught of cool air before the walls have set collapses the puff. The comment about the "uneven heat of a cooking range" is a real distinction — a range oven at the time had hot and cold quarters, which is much of why the author calls these "mighty uncertain."
- Lard or butterBoth were standard in a bakeshop. Lard gives a slightly crisper, more neutral shell; butter gives flavour and browns faster. Modern shortening is not a like-for-like substitute for the lard of the period.
- The slitCut it as soon as the puffs leave the oven and let them cool open, so trapped steam escapes and the interior dries instead of going soggy. Fill only once the shells and the pastry cream are both fully cold, and keep filled puffs refrigerated.
- YieldThe original sentence is cut off — "Makes 40 to" — but at small spoonfuls this quantity gives roughly 40 to 60 puffs. Halving the batch is sensible for a home oven, since they are best eaten the day they are baked.
Choux paste is generally traced to sixteenth-century Italian cooks working in France — the confection is often credited to a pastry cook named Popelini in Catherine de' Medici's train, a story repeated far more often than it is documented — but the version here is broadly the one associated with Antonin Carême's generation in the early nineteenth century. The French names the author lists are all one paste in different shapes: éclair (lightning), profiterole, and petits choux, little cabbages; he himself only ventures that a perfect puff "looks like a small cauliflower," "whence, perhaps, comes one of their French names." What is most of its period is the anecdote about the ordinary workman who traveled town to town as a first-class pastry cook on this one trick. Jessup Whitehead wrote for hotel and restaurant kitchens in the era of the itinerant journeyman cook, when a single reliable showpiece could carry a man through a season's engagements, and his books are as much trade reportage as recipe collection.