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Cake
Mrs. Upham.
Cream filled cakes: These delicious cakes are very easily made if care is taken to have the water boiling. Measure out one-half pint and put in a small kettle; immediately after it comes to a boil again put in twothirds of a cup of butter and one and a-half cups of flour; stir briskly for a moment, leaving it over the fire; remove this mixture and place in a dish where it will get entirely cold; beat five large fresh eggs very thoroughly, then stir in your cold mixture a spoonful at a time ; stir in all until smooth and free from lumps ; ; drop them upon a greased dripping pan in small pearshaped cakes; bake half an hour in a real hot oven; don't be afraid they will burn unless you see them doing SO.
When done they will be hollow inside, of a bright brown colour; if not done well they will flatten. The oven must be hot when you put them in, and if kept so success is sure.
Filling of cream; Put a little more than one pint of milk in a pail and set in boiling water; beat two eggs, two-thirds cup of corn starch, one full cup sugar, onehalf teaspoonful salt, and some vanilla, mix thoroughly together; add a full half cup of milk, and stir all into your boiling milk; it should be very thick; cut open your cakes nearthe bottom and fill very full of cream; be sure the cream is cold.
This is pâte à choux and a cornstarch pastry cream — cream puffs, written before either term was common in American household books. The method is sound; the measurements and oven language need translating.
- Half a pint of waterOne cup. Bring it to a full boil with the butter (two-thirds cup, about 5 oz) rather than adding the butter after, so the fat is fully melted when the flour goes in.
- "A real hot oven"Roughly 425F. The high heat is what turns the water in the dough to steam and inflates the puffs. Some bakers drop to 375F after the first 15 minutes to dry the shells through without burning the crust.
- Do not open the ovenThe likeliest sense of "don't be afraid they will burn" is that the puffs must be left alone until their walls have set; opened to a draft too early they collapse and stay flat. Judge doneness by the bright brown colour the recipe names and a dry, firm shell, not by the clock.
- Cool the paste before the eggsThe original is right to insist on it. Hot paste scrambles the egg. Lukewarm is enough; "entirely cold" makes the dough stiff and hard to beat, so cool it to about body temperature and add the eggs one at a time.
- Five large eggsEggs were ungraded in the nineteenth century, and "large" then likely meant something smaller than the modern graded egg. Add the fifth egg only if the paste still holds a stiff peak that slowly falls from the spoon; too much egg gives a slack dough that spreads.
- Dripping panA rimmed baking sheet. Greased is fine, though parchment is more reliable. Space the mounds well apart — they expand considerably, roughly doubling.
- The filling vessel"A pail set in boiling water" is a double boiler. Whisk constantly; cornstarch pastry cream must come to a bubble to lose its raw starch taste and to let the starch fully thicken, then cook a minute longer.
- Two-thirds cup cornstarchThat is a very stiff set by modern standards for the roughly a pint and a quarter of milk the recipe uses — closer to a sliceable pudding than a piping cream. Half that amount gives a filling that still holds inside a split puff.
- Yield and keepingA large batch; the count depends entirely on how small the mounds are piped. Fill only when both shells and cream are completely cold, as the recipe says, and eat the same day; a filled puff softens within a few hours and the dairy filling belongs in the refrigerator.
Choux paste — flour and butter cooked into boiling water, then beaten with eggs — is generally traced to Italian pastry cooks working in sixteenth-century France, and the puff filled with sweetened cream was long established in French confectionery before it reached American home kitchens. What is notable here is that the recipe arrives without any of that vocabulary: no choux, no profiterole, no "cream puff" even, just "cream filled cakes" and a set of instructions careful enough to suggest the contributor expected her readers had never made one. The Home Cook Book was a compiled charity cookbook, assembled from recipes signed by the women who supplied them, and Mrs. Upham's entry reads like a person talking someone through a technique that could go wrong — the repeated insistence on a hot oven, the reassurance about burning, the warning that underbaked puffs will flatten. That tone of reassurance is the mark of a dish still slightly unfamiliar to the domestic cook of the 1870s.