No. 3296

Cream Cakes with Whipped Cream or St. Honore Cream

Choux a la Creme Fouettee ou a la Creme St. Honore

With some cream cake paste (No. 132) pushed through a socket pocket dress on a lightly buttered baking sheet some small round cakes, an inch and a half in diameter; cover over with powdered sugar and leave stand for a few moments, then remove all the sugar that has failed to adhere to the paste; push into a very slack oven to cook. Detach them from the pan as soon as done and split open the side to fill with pastry cream (No. 46), or whipped cream flavored with vanilla (No. 50). They can also be filled through the top by making an opening and placing the cover on upside down. Push a small string of royal icing (No. 101) around the edge all around the opening. Dredge over some fine pink colored sugar (No. 172) and fill the insides with St. Honore cream (No. 49) pushed in through a pocket.

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For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer's cross-referenced numbers make this look more complicated than it is: these are small cream puffs, piped, baked, and filled. The one instruction worth arguing with is the oven.

"A very slack oven"Slack ovens are usually reckoned at roughly 275-300F, and choux will not rise reliably at that temperature: the paste needs a burst of steam to inflate before the shell sets. Modern practice is 425F for the first 10-15 minutes, then down to 350F for another 15-20 until the shells are dry and deep gold. Why Ranhofer specifies so cool an oven is unclear; his own heat scale may not map onto the usual reading of the term.
"Socket pocket"A pastry bag fitted with a plain tube. A half-inch plain tip gives the inch-and-a-half rounds called for here.
The sugar coatDusting with powdered sugar, letting it sit to absorb moisture, then knocking off the excess is a genuine technique — it gives a thin crackled crust. Fine granulated or a light dusting of pearl sugar does the same job and is easier to knock loose.
Cream cake paste (No. 132)Pâte à choux. Ranhofer's own proportions are in the cross-referenced recipe, not here; a standard modern choux runs roughly 1 cup water, 1/2 cup butter, 1 cup flour, 4 eggs.
St. Honore cream (No. 49)Almost certainly a crème Chiboust: pastry cream lightened with Italian meringue, usually set with a little gelatine. Whatever Ranhofer's exact formula, it is not interchangeable with plain whipped cream; it holds its shape at room temperature where whipped cream weeps. If you substitute, use a stabilised diplomat cream rather than plain whipped.
Pink colored sugar (No. 172)Presumably granulated sugar coloured with cochineal or carmine, the usual period reds. Any commercial sanding sugar does the same thing now.
Don't fill earlyFilled choux go soft within a couple of hours. Bake and fill the same day, and pierce each shell as it comes out of the oven so steam escapes.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchens at Delmonico's in New York for some three decades, and The Epicurean (1894) is essentially his working system set down in print — hence the dense web of cross-references, each component recipe numbered once and called on wherever needed. The St. Honoré cream here carries the name of the gâteau Saint-Honoré, usually traced to the Paris pâtissier Chiboust, whose shop stood on the rue Saint-Honoré in the 1840s, though the attribution is traditional rather than documented and is sometimes given instead to a pastry cook in his employ; Saint Honoratus of Amiens is the patron of bakers, so the street and the trade share a namesake. That a New York restaurant kitchen was turning out choux à la crème fouettée by the tray in the 1890s says a good deal about how completely French pastry had colonised the American luxury table — the section they sit in, "Small Cakes for Entremets," keeps the French service term entremets untranslated.