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Ring Puffs With Jelly
For luncheon or supper.
Make a puff fritter paste, the Spanish puff preferable, but the others will answer. Put a tube in the forcing sack not much larger at the point than a pencil, and half fill the sack with the paste. Squeeze out piping and form rings of it the size of the top of a coffee cup, on tin lids previously greased over with lard. When the frying fat is hot, dip the lids in it upside down and the rings will slip off. Fry them light brown; drain on a colander; split them all round with a sharp penknife; spread jelly, or fruit jam, or lemon butter between the halves; place them together again, dredge powdered sugar over and pile on a stand covered with a napkin.
This is fried choux paste — what Whitehead calls a "puff fritter paste" and "Spanish puff" — piped into rings and split like tiny sandwiches. The whole recipe turns on getting the ring into the fat intact.
- The lid trick, and why it worksPiping directly into hot fat distorts the ring; piping onto a greased surface and inverting it into the fat lets the ring set in one piece. Squares of parchment work the same way in a modern kitchen and can be lifted out of the fat with tongs once the ring releases.
- "Spanish puff" pasteThe recipe treats this as one of several puff fritter pastes and does not define it here; on the evidence of the method it is a choux-type paste — water or milk, butter, flour cooked to a ball, then eggs beaten in. Any standard pâte à choux should answer, made slightly stiff so the piped ring holds its shape.
- Fat and temperature"When the frying fat is hot" is the only guide given; for fried choux a moderate fat, in the region of 340-360F, suits best. Too cool and the rings soak fat and stay pale; too hot and they colour before the interior sets and collapse as they cool. Lard is what Whitehead used; a neutral high-smoke-point oil works as well.
- Frying timeRoughly two to four minutes total, turning once. The recipe says "light brown," but choux that is only surface-coloured looks done and goes damp and heavy within minutes of draining, so fry until set through. Sacrifice one and split it before committing the batch.
- Pipe sizeA tube "not much larger at the point than a pencil" is roughly a 5/16- to 3/8-inch plain round tip. Rings "the size of the top of a coffee cup" means about 2 1/2 to 3 inches across.
- DrainingA colander is what he had; a rack over a sheet pan is better, since the rings will not sit in their own drippings. Fill only once completely cool or the jelly slumps out.
- Lemon butterThis is lemon curd — eggs, sugar, lemon and butter cooked to a thick custard. It is not flavoured butter.
- Yield and timingA standard choux batch using 1 cup flour and 4 eggs gives about 18 to 20 rings. They are at their best within an hour or two of frying; filled and sugared, they do not hold overnight.
Jessup Whitehead wrote for the men working hotel and restaurant pastry stations in late nineteenth-century America, which is why this reads as a production note rather than a domestic recipe — the forcing sack, the greased tin lids, the finished pile on a napkin-covered stand for a buffet luncheon table. Fried choux has a long pedigree in European pastry: dropped in spoonfuls the same paste gives the French beignets soufflés, also called pets de nonne, while piped rings of it are the form later familiar as the French cruller. "Spanish puff" appears to be one of several nineteenth-century trade names for a choux or choux-like paste, and such labels shifted from book to book; what stayed constant was the technique of cooking flour into hot liquid and beating in eggs, which gives enough structure for the paste to inflate in fat without a raising agent. Splitting and filling the cooled ring with jelly is the frugal hotel gesture — one paste, one fryer, and whatever preserve the pantry had open.