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Transparent Puffs
These rise in shape like bells, or inverted teacups. 1 pint of water. 2 ounces of butter. 6 ounces of corn starch. 5 whole eggs and 4 whites.
This is an éclair paste (pâte à choux) in which cornstarch replaces the usual flour, which is what makes the shells thin, glassy and hollow. The book assumes a professional pastry cook, so nearly all of the method is missing; here it is, plus the conversions.
- The method the book leaves outBring the water and butter to a full boil together, dump in all the cornstarch at once and stir over the heat until the paste pulls away from the pan in a smooth mass. Cool to warm, then beat in the eggs one at a time, whites last, until the paste is glossy and just falls from the spoon.
- The hinge: do not underbakeTransparent puffs collapse if pulled early. Bake until the shells are dry, firm and coloured, and leave them in the turned-off oven with the door ajar for another ten minutes to set the walls. A puff that gives under finger pressure will slump on the rack.
- OvenThe book gives no oven instruction. As a modern reconstruction: start hot, about 425F, for the first 10-15 minutes to drive the steam that raises them, then drop to 350F for 20-25 minutes to dry them out.
- Weights to volume6 ounces of cornstarch is roughly 1 1/3 cups; 2 ounces of butter is 4 tablespoons. A pint of water is 2 cups. Weigh the cornstarch if you can, since it packs and settles in the cup.
- Cornstarch is not flourCornstarch has no gluten, so the paste is looser and more fragile than a flour-based choux. The payoff is a shell that bakes almost translucent, which presumably accounts for the name.
- The extra whitesFive whole eggs plus four whites is a deliberately white-heavy mix: more water and albumen for lift, less yolk fat to weigh the structure down. Save the yolks for a pastry cream to fill them.
- Piping and yieldPipe or spoon mounds about 1 1/2 inches across, well spaced, on parchment. This is a hotel-scale batch, likely three dozen or more small puffs; halve it for home use.
The American Pastry Cook belongs to the run of late nineteenth-century American trade manuals written for hotel and restaurant kitchens rather than households, which is why the entry gives weights and no method at all: the reader was assumed to know how éclair paste behaves and needed only the formula. The interest here is the cornstarch. Commercial cornstarch became cheap and widely available in the United States in the second half of the century, its manufacture generally traced to the wheat- and corn-starch works of the 1840s, and it turns up freely in American trade books as a thickener for pie fillings and creams and, as here, as a substitute for flour. The comparison to "bells, or inverted teacups" is a working cook's shorthand for the shape a well-risen puff takes when the steam lifts the shell before the crust sets.