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Light German Puffs or Puddings
923. Melt three ounces of butter in one pint of cream, and let it stand till nearly cold; then mix with it two ounces of fine flour, two ounces of sugar, four yolks and two whites of eggs, and a little rose or orange-flower water. Butter some little cups, pour in the ingredients, and bake for half an hour. They should be taken out of the cups and served the moment they are done, or they will be heavy; serve with white wine and sugar.
A batter of scalded cream, flour, sugar and eggs baked in small moulds — closer to a baked custard-popover than to a modern pudding. The instruction that matters most is the last one: they collapse and turn dense within minutes of leaving the oven, so everything else should be ready before they come out.
- Cream measureA British pint here is 20 fl oz, so use 2 1/2 cups of cream rather than 2. Single cream (about 18% fat) or a half-and-half mixture behaves better than heavy cream, which makes the puffs greasy.
- Let the cream cool"Let it stand till nearly cold" is not optional: flour and egg yolks stirred into hot buttered cream will thicken or scramble. The recipe asks for nearly cold, not lukewarm.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given, and none can be inferred from the text; a moderate oven of roughly 375F suits the half-hour bake, hot enough to lift the batter without curdling the custard. The size of the cups is not specified.
- The cups"Little cups" means dariole moulds or small ramekins, buttered generously and set on a baking sheet. Fill them about two-thirds full; the batter rises considerably.
- Flavouring waterRose water and orange-flower water sold today can be very concentrated, so err downward. One to two teaspoons is a little; a tablespoon will taste of soap.
- The eggsFour yolks to two whites is deliberate — the extra yolks enrich and set the custard while limited white keeps it from becoming rubbery. Do not round it up to four whole eggs.
- Serving sauce"White wine and sugar" means a thin pouring sauce: a dry white wine warmed with sugar to taste, sometimes thickened with a yolk. It is served separately, not baked with the puffs.
- YieldThe quantities fill six to eight small moulds, enough for six at table.
"German puffs" run through English cookery books from the mid-eighteenth century onward, and the family resemblance to a Yorkshire pudding batter or a French pet de nonne is close: eggs, flour, dairy, high heat, and a race against the collapse. The "German" label in Georgian and Victorian kitchens was applied loosely to sweet baked and boiled puddings thought to have come by way of the Hanoverian court or of German pastry cooks working in London, and it is generally treated as a period convention rather than evidence of a specific origin. It appears in The British Cookery Book — a compilation of contributed receipts gathered in the 1850s — at a time when small individually moulded puddings were becoming common alongside the great boiled and basin puddings of earlier generations.