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Dixie Cream Puffs
Five eggs, whites and yolks beaten separately, one and a half cups each of white sugar and sifted flour, two tea-spoons baking powder in the flour; bake in tea-cups, filling about half full. The cream is prepared by placing a small tin pail containing a pint sweet milk in a kettle of boiling water; beat the whites and yolks of two eggs separately; stir in the milk while boiling, a half tea-cup sugar, a large table-spoon corn starch dissolved in a little sweet milk, then the beaten yolks and a piece of butter the size of a large walnut; flavor with lemon or vanilla. When done, cut the cakes open, put in a spoonful of the cream, place together again, roll in the whites, and then in coarse granulated sugar.-
A sponge batter baked in teacups, split and filled with a cornstarch custard — closer to a filled sponge than to a choux-pastry cream puff. The finishing step, however, coats the outside of the cakes in raw egg white that never sees heat, and that is where the recipe fails for a modern kitchen.
- The raw white coatingThe two whites left over from the custard are used uncooked as glue for the sugar, and nothing afterwards heats them. Egg white can carry Salmonella, and a cake left to sit at room temperature with a raw-egg glaze gives it hours to multiply. Use a current recipe for a filled cream puff instead.
- Custard held below temperatureThe filling is cooked over boiling water in a pail with the yolks added at the end, and the original gives no doneness cue for the custard at all. A pint of milk in a tin pail is slow to come up, and yolks stirred into it at the last moment may never reach a temperature that matters.
- Cooling and holdingNothing in the original says to chill the custard or the finished cakes. A milk-and-egg filling is a standard high-risk food, and such recipes generally presumed cool storage and prompt eating rather than modern handling.
- Tea-cupsA nineteenth-century tea-cup is usually reckoned at roughly 4 to 6 fluid ounces, smaller than a modern mug — used here as individual cake moulds, filled half full so the batter can climb.
- Tin pail in a kettleThis is an improvised double boiler: a pail set down into a pot of boiling water. The point is to keep the milk off direct heat.
- Butter the size of a large walnutRoughly 1 tablespoon, shelled walnut rather than in the shell. "Sweet milk" means fresh whole milk, as distinct from the sour or buttermilk that also stood in the pantry.
- Baking powder and no oven numberTwo teaspoons to a cup and a half of flour is somewhat more than current proportions, and the original gives no oven heat at all — the cook was expected to judge it.
The Dixie Cook Book was one of the Estelle Woods Wilcox compilations of the 1880s, Southern-marketed reworkings of her earlier Buckeye Cookery material, and such books commonly collected contributed recipes under whatever name the contributor used. "Cream puff" here does not mean choux pastry: it is a small sponge cake baked in a teacup, split, filled and rolled in coarse sugar. The filling is a period pastry cream thickened with corn starch, which was commercially available and increasingly common as a household thickener in American kitchens from the middle of the nineteenth century. The improvised double boiler — a tin pail set into a kettle of boiling water — is the sort of instruction that suggests the writer had no dedicated equipment and assumed the reader had none either.