Cream Cakes
1/2 cup butter 1 cup boiling water 4 eggs 1 cup flour Pour butter and water in saucepan and place on front of range. As soon as boiling-point is reached, add flour all at once, and stir vigorously. Remove from fire as soon as mixed, and add unbeaten eggs one at a time, beating, until thoroughly mixed, between the addition of eggs. Drop by spoonfuls on a buttered sheet, one and one-half inches apart, shaping with handle of spoon as nearly circular as possible, having mixture slightly piled in centre. Bake thirty minutes in a moderate oven. With a sharp knife make a cut in each large enough to admit of Cream Filling. This recipe makes eighteen small cream cakes. For flavoring cream filling use lemon extract. If cream cakes are removed from oven before being thoroughly cooked, they will fall. If in doubt, take one from oven, and if it does not fall, this is sufficient proof that others are cooked.
This is pâte à choux under an older American name: the same paste that becomes cream puffs, éclairs and profiteroles. Fannie Farmer's version is sound, but a few of her directions assume a coal range and a cook who knows what she is looking at.
- The hinge: do not open the oven earlyThe steam trapped inside the paste is what inflates it, and the shell must set dry before that steam escapes. Farmer's own test — pull one out, see whether it collapses — is still the best one, but do it at the end of the baking time, not partway through.
- "Front of range"On a coal range the front of the top, nearer the fire, ran hotter than the back, which was used for slow cooking and keeping things warm. Read it as medium-high heat on a burner; the butter must be fully melted and the water at a true rolling boil before the flour goes in.
- Oven temperatureThe book gives no oven temperatures. "Moderate" is conventionally read today as roughly 350-375°F, and thirty minutes at a steady 350°F will produce puffs. Many modern choux recipes start hotter, around 425°F for the first 10-15 minutes to force the rise, then drop to 350°F to dry the shells out.
- Dry the paste before the eggsThe recipe says to remove from the fire as soon as the flour is mixed. Keeping it on the heat another minute or two, stirring, until a film forms on the pan bottom drives off water and gives a stiffer, better-rising paste.
- Egg sizeFour eggs to one cup of flour is close to the classic choux ratio, but modern eggs run larger. Add the last egg in stages and stop when the paste falls from the spoon in a thick ribbon rather than a blob — it should hold a soft peak, not slump.
- Buttered sheetParchment on the sheet is easier and gives a flatter base. If you butter the pan, use it sparingly; too much fat makes the paste spread rather than climb.
- The slitCut the puffs while still hot so the interior steam escapes; a sealed shell goes soggy from the inside. Some cooks return the split shells to the turned-off oven for five minutes to dry.
- The fillingCream Filling in this book is a stovetop pastry cream of milk, sugar, egg and flour or cornstarch, cooked until thick. Cool it fully before filling, and fill no more than a couple of hours before serving.
- YieldEighteen small puffs, as stated — expect a dozen if you pipe them larger.
Choux paste — flour cooked into boiling liquid, then loosened with eggs — is generally traced to Italian and French court cookery of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the name is usually explained by the cabbage-like shape of the baked puff. By the time Fannie Farmer published The Boston Cooking-School Cook-Book in 1896, the technique was well established in American kitchens and appears here under the plain name "cream cakes." What makes the entry characteristic of Farmer is the last line: instead of describing the finished puff in impressionistic terms, she gives a repeatable test — take one out, see if it falls. That insistence on verifiable results, alongside her level measurements, is much of what made the book a standard American reference for decades.