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Boston Cream Puffs
Put one-half pint of water into a saucepan with one-fourth pound of lard, and a little salt, and then boil. Add one-fourth pound of flour, or more, if required, and stir over the fire for five minutes longer, or until it becomes a smooth paste. Remove from the fire, and mix in five eggs, one at a time. Drop small quantities of the mixture with a spoon onto slightly-buttered baking tins, allowing an inch or so of distance between each. Put the sheet into a moderate oven and bake for twenty minutes. Open the puffs by making an incision in the sides, and fill them with cream.
This is standard pâte à choux under a New England name, written for cooks who already knew the method. The measurements are by weight and the oven instruction is the weak point.
- The quantities in cupsOne-half pint of water is 1 cup (240 ml). One-fourth pound of lard is 1/2 cup (115 g), and one-fourth pound of flour is about 3/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons if you scoop it — weigh it at 115 g rather than measuring by volume, since choux is sensitive to the flour-to-liquid ratio.
- Lard or butterLard gives a tender, slightly savoury shell and was cheap and widely used when the book appeared. Unsalted butter at the same weight is the usual modern substitute, though it is not an exact swap: butter carries water that lard does not, so the paste will be slightly slacker. If you use butter, keep the pinch of salt.
- The eggs are the hingeEggs called for in period recipes were often smaller than today's large eggs, and size was not standardised. Beat them in one at a time as directed and stop when the paste falls from the spoon in a thick ribbon and holds a soft peak - you may need only four modern large eggs, or four plus a beaten fraction of the fifth. Too much egg and the puffs spread and collapse.
- Oven temperature'Moderate oven' is conventionally read as around 350F, which is too gentle to raise choux properly. Current practice starts them at 400-425F for the first 15 minutes to generate steam, then drops to 350F to dry the shells through - total time closer to 30-35 minutes than the twenty given here.
- Do not open the doorThe recipe is silent on this. Keep the door shut for the first two-thirds of the bake; a draught of cool air at the wrong moment deflates the puffs permanently.
- The incision does double dutySlitting the sides is not only for filling. Cut them as soon as they leave the oven so trapped steam escapes, then return them to the switched-off oven for five minutes to dry the interiors, or the insides stay damp and the shells soften within the hour.
- What "cream" meansWhat 'cream' means -- The recipe says only 'cream', which at this date could mean either whipped cream or a cooked pastry cream (milk, sugar, egg yolks, cornstarch or flour, cooked to a thick custard and cooled); given the name, custard is the likelier reading. If you use pastry cream, fill only when both shell and custard are completely cold, and serve the same day; filled puffs go soggy fast and the custard needs refrigeration.
- YieldSpooned in small quantities as directed, this batch gives roughly 20 to 24 puffs about two inches across. Larger mounds work but need the longer end of the baking time.
Choux paste is French in origin and generally traced to the sixteenth-century Italian and French court kitchens, but by the late nineteenth century it had been thoroughly naturalised in American cookbooks, where it usually appears simply as "cream puffs." Versions filled with a cooked custard rather than whipped cream draw on the same pastry-cream tradition that gives us Boston cream pie, a cake rather than a pie, filled the same way. Oscar Tschirky's book, published in 1896 while he was ma tre d'h tel at the Waldorf, collects both grand hotel cookery and plain American household dishes like this one, and this recipe calls for lard rather than butter.