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Royal Pastry
Put two gills of water in a large saucepan with a little more than four ounces of fresh butter, two ounces of sugar, the peel of one lemon, and a little salt. Boil it till the butter is melted, then take the lemon peel out; throw in sufficient finely-sifted flour to make a stiff paste, stir it over the fire with a wooden spoon till the paste can be easily detached from the saucepan, then take it off. Break in, one at a time, five or six eggs, but do not put more than the paste can absorb, and mix each one in before the next is added. Shape the paste into equal-sized balls, and put them about one inch apart from each other on a baking-sheet. Brush over with a paste-brush dipped in beaten egg and milk, put them in a moderately hot oven, and do not open the door till they are done, or they will flatten. Dry them, detach them from the baking-sheet with the point of a knife, make a small hole in the tops, put one teaspoonful of jam, or any kind of sweetmeat in each, and serve.
This is pâte à choux under an older name — the same paste used for cream puffs, éclairs and profiteroles, here scented with lemon and filled with jam. The method is sound; only the measurements and oven language need translating.
- Two gills of waterA gill is half a cup, so this is one cup (240 ml) of water. With it go a little over 4 oz butter (one stick plus a tablespoon) and 2 oz sugar, about a quarter cup.
- The flour is unmeasured on purpose"Sufficient finely-sifted flour to make a stiff paste" is the one genuinely open quantity here. For a cup of liquid, expect somewhere around 4.5 to 5 oz (a scant to full cup) of plain flour, added all at once and beaten in hard.
- Drying the panade is the hingeStirring "till the paste can be easily detached from the saucepan" means cooking off water until the dough balls up and leaves a thin film on the pan base. Skip this and the puffs will not rise. Let it cool a few minutes before the eggs go in, or they will scramble.
- Five or six eggs, but only as many as it takesThe instruction not to add more than the paste can absorb is the right one. Stop when the dough falls from the spoon in a thick ribbon and a furrow drawn through it closes slowly. Eggs sold today are often larger than those such recipes assumed, so four to five may be enough.
- "Moderately hot oven"In period usage this points to something around 375-400F (190-200C). Modern choux practice is to start hotter, about 425F (220C) for the first 10-15 minutes for steam lift, then drop to about 350F (175C) for a further 20-25 minutes to set and dry the shells; that two-stage schedule is a modern adaptation, not the original instruction. The warning not to open the door applies to the first hot stretch above all.
- "Dry them"This reads as a separate step rather than a flourish. Returning the baked puffs to a turned-off or very low oven for five to ten minutes lets the interior steam escape so the walls stay crisp; the original gives no temperature, and it has the hole made later, when filling.
- Egg washBeaten egg thinned with milk, brushed thinly. Let none run down onto the sheet, where it glues the base and stops the puff rising evenly.
- Spacing and yieldAn inch apart is tight for choux; two inches is safer. A batch this size gives roughly 24 to 30 small puffs, enough for eight to ten people as a sweet.
- Fill coldJam or preserve should go in only after the shells have cooled completely, or the moisture softens them within minutes.
Choux paste is generally traced to Italian cooks working in sixteenth-century France, and by the nineteenth century it had become one of the fixed foundations of the French pastry kitchen — Carême and his successors built éclairs, profiteroles, gâteaux St-Honoré and the fried beignet on the same cooked, egg-enriched dough. The name "royal pastry" belongs to the older English and Anglo-French kitchen vocabulary, where "royal" attached itself to preparations thought fine enough for a good table; it appears in period cookbooks for several unrelated things, including royal icing. The lemon peel steeped in the boiling butter and water is a period touch that has largely dropped out of modern choux recipes.