Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Cream Puffs
Cream Puffs
Warm slightly one pound of butter, and beat it well with one-half pound of caster-sugar, then mix in two eggs. Put one and one-fourth pounds of sifted flour into a basin, with two tablespoonfuls of baking powder, stir in the beaten mixture and work until it is quite smooth. Shape the dough into cakes and bake in a sharp oven. Beat two eggs with four ounces of caster-sugar and one pint of milk, then stir them in with one-fourth of a pound of sifted flour. When smooth turn the mixture into a stewpan, and stir over a moderate fire until thick. When cooked cut the cakes in halves, scoop out a little soft paste, and fill them with cream. Arrange them neatly on a dish over which has been spread a folded napkin and serve.
Despite the name, this is not choux pastry. It is a rich baking-powder dough baked as small cakes, then split and filled with a flour-thickened pastry cream — closer to a filled biscuit than to the hollow puff a modern reader expects.
- Scale it downAs written the dough uses 1 lb butter and 1¼ lb flour, enough for roughly two to three dozen cakes, and the filling — a pint of milk plus eggs, sugar and flour — makes something over a pint. Quartering both parts gives 6–8 puffs and is more manageable.
- Caster-sugarSuperfine or baker's sugar. Ordinary granulated works in the dough; for the pastry cream the finer grind dissolves faster, and you can pulse granulated sugar briefly in a food processor.
- A sharp ovenRead this as 425–450F. The cakes are small and heavily buttered, so watch them from about 10 minutes; the bottoms colour first. "Moderate fire" for the custard means medium-low on a modern burner.
- The hinge: cook the flour outThe filling is a crème pâtissière, and it must come to a full bubbling simmer and be stirred hard for a minute or two after it thickens. Stopping at "thick" leaves raw starch and the cream tastes pasty and breaks on standing.
- Temper the eggsThe original mixes eggs, sugar, milk and flour cold, then heats the lot — workable, but whisk the flour smooth into a little of the cold milk first and strain the mixture into the pan, or you will chase lumps with the spoon.
- Chill before fillingPress plastic wrap onto the surface of the hot cream and refrigerate until cold and set. Warm filling will soak straight into the crumb of the split cakes.
- The napkinServing pastry on a folded napkin was a common convention in period service; the napkin will soak up grease and keep the cakes from sliding on a silver dish. Harmless to keep, entirely optional.
Oscar Tschirky, maître d'hôtel of the Waldorf and later the Waldorf-Astoria, published his cook book in 1896, and its dessert chapters lean heavily on the English and French pastry vocabulary of the day. That a page headed "Cream Puffs" contains no choux paste at all is striking, since American cookbooks of the period usually reserve the name for choux; chemical leavening — cheap and by then a few decades old in commercial baking — made such cakes quicker for a pastry cook than a boiled-and-beaten pâte à choux. The filling is a flour-thickened pastry cream rather than a cornstarch one, the older of the two methods.