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Cream Puffs (II)
Mrs. J. D. Odell.
One and one-half cups flour, two-thirds cup butter, one-half pint water; boil butter and water together, stir in flour while boiling, let it cool, and add five well beaten eggs; drop on tins and bake in a quick oven. When cool fill with the following: One pint of milk, one cup sugar, two-thirds cup corn starch, two eggs; beat sugar, eggs, and flour together; stir in the milk while boiling; flavour with lemon or vanilla.
A standard choux paste with a cornstarch pastry cream, written for cooks who already knew both. The gaps worth filling are the oven, the egg technique, and the filling's starch.
- Half a pint of waterOne cup. The butter is generous by modern standards — two-thirds cup is about 150 g — which gives a rich, soft paste; scaling back to half a cup makes a sturdier shell that holds its shape better.
- A quick oven425-450F. Start the puffs there for about 15 minutes to get the lift, then drop to 350F for another 20-25 minutes to dry the walls. Pulling them early is the usual cause of collapse.
- Let it coolThis is the hinge. The flour paste must come down to warm — not hot — before the eggs go in, or they scramble and the puffs will not rise. Beat each addition in fully; the finished paste should fall from the spoon in a thick ribbon.
- Five well beaten eggsEggs of the period were not standardised and may well have run smaller than today's large. Add the fifth egg only if the paste still looks stiff, and judge by consistency rather than count.
- Don't open the doorThe recipe does not say it because the cook of the period was watching a range she understood. Steam is what inflates these; a draught partway through flattens them.
- The filling's "flour"Read that as the cornstarch already listed — the words were used loosely. Two-thirds cup starch to a pint of milk gives a very firm, sliceable cream, closer to a blancmange than a modern pastry cream; two-thirds of that amount is plenty if you want it spoonable.
- Cook the cream properlyBring it to a full boil for a minute or two after it thickens, stirring hard. Underboiled cornstarch tastes raw and chalky, and undercooked egg will thin the cream as it stands.
- Fill cold, and ventSplit or pierce each puff while still warm to let the steam out, then cool both shell and cream completely before filling. Warm cream in a warm shell goes soggy within the hour.
- YieldAbout 18 to 24 puffs, or more if dropped small. Fill on the day they are served.
Cream puffs are the American domestic name for the finished pastry made from pâte à choux, the twice-cooked paste that French pastry cooks developed out of earlier boiled-dough confections and which was well established in professional kitchens by the early nineteenth century. What is striking here is how thoroughly it had migrated into ordinary home baking by the 1870s: no mention of a pastry bag, no French terminology, just "drop on tins" and a filling stiffened with cornstarch, an ingredient that had only become cheap and widely available in North America a generation earlier. The Home Cook Book was compiled from recipes contributed by named local women and sold for charity, which is why this page carries Mrs. J. D. Odell's signature and no explanation of technique — she was writing for neighbours who would recognise the method from the proportions alone.