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Boston Cream Puffs
Put half pint hot water and two-thirds cup butter over the fire; when boiling, stir in one and a half cups flour, and continue stirring until smooth and the mixture leaves the sides of the sauce-pan; remove from fire, cool, and beat thoroughly into it five well-beaten eggs. Drop on warm greased tins (or a dripping-pan), a tablespoon in a place, leaving space between to prevent touching, brush over with the white of an egg, and bake ten or fifteen minutes in a quick oven. When cakes are done, they will be hollow. When cold, slice off the top, fill space with the cream, and replace top. Cream for Inside. -Take one pint milk, place one-half in a tin pail and set in boiling water; reserve from the other half two tablespoons to mix with eggs, and into the rest, while cold, mix one cup of flour until smooth; when the milk is hot, pour in the flour, and stir until thicker than boiled custard; then beat well together the two table-spoons milk, two eggs, one cup granulated sugar, a level table-spoon butter, and a tea-spoon vanilla or lemon; add gradually, and continue stirring briskly until so thick that when cold it will drop, not pour, from the spoon. The puffs may be kept on hand. Make the cream fresh, let it cool, and fill as many as are wanted. -Mrs. Ex-Governor Noyes, Cincinnati, Ohio.
This is choux paste under an older name, with a flour-thickened pastry cream to fill it. The proportions are sound; the vagueness is all in the oven and the doneness.
- The hinge: bake until truly dryTen to fifteen minutes is far too short for puffs this size. Start at 425F for about 15 minutes to get the lift, then drop to 350F and bake another 20-25 minutes until deep gold and light in the hand. A puff pulled early will collapse into a damp lump as it cools.
- Do not open the ovenThe rise comes entirely from steam trapped in the paste. Opening the door in the first 20 minutes drops the temperature and the puffs sink.
- "Quick oven"Conventionally taken as roughly 400-450F.
- Half pint hot waterOne cup. With two-thirds cup butter this is a richer paste than the usual modern choux, which runs nearer half a cup of butter to a cup of water.
- Cool before the eggsThe instruction to remove from the fire and cool matters. Let the paste come down to warm, not hot, or the eggs scramble and the paste will not emulsify. Beat in the eggs one or two at a time until the paste is glossy and falls thickly from the spoon.
- The egg-white washBrushing with white alone gives a thin crisp shell rather than the shine of a whole-egg glaze. Use it sparingly and keep it off the pan, where it glues the base down.
- The filling is a flour pastry creamOne cup flour to one pint milk sets very stiff, which is what allows it to "drop, not pour." Cook it two or three minutes past thickening after the eggs go in, whisking hard, so the raw-flour taste cooks out and the eggs are properly set.
- Yield and keepingThe advice to store the shells and fill to order is good practice: filled puffs soften within a couple of hours, while empty shells keep a day in a tin and crisp again in a 300F oven.
"Boston cream" in nineteenth-century American cookbooks meant a flour-thickened custard rather than whipped cream, and it turns up filling everything from these puffs to the layer cake that still carries the name. The pastry itself is French pate a choux, though books of this period rarely name it as such, filing it instead under cakes because it was dropped by the spoonful and served at tea. The attribution is characteristic of The Dixie Cook-Book and its Ohio-published relatives, which gathered contributions from prominent women and printed their husbands' titles alongside: Mrs. Ex-Governor Noyes was the wife of Edward F. Noyes, governor of Ohio from 1872 to 1874. Such credits vouched for the recipe.