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Beignets Fourres with Cream
Prepare a pate-a-choux. Mix in. a tablespoon fine sugar and a teaspoon vanilla essence. Heat well, but not to a boiling point, one quart lard in a frying pan, then with a teaspoon drop in the paste in walnut-like bits and slowly fry until a nice golden colour, which will take about fifteen minutes, being very careful to turn with the skimmer once in a while. Remove, thoroughly drain on a towel, then with the aid of a small knife make a small aperture in each. Beat up one and a half gills cream with a whisk to a thick froth, add one ounce sugar, a teaspoon vanilla essence and mix well. Make a cornet with a piece of white paper, drop the cream into the cornet, cut off a very small piece of the paper at bottom of cornet, then fill the beignets with the cream, dress on a dish with a napkin, sprinkle a little powdered sugar over and serve.
Fried choux paste — beignets soufflés — filled with whipped cream. The recipe assumes you already know pâte à choux and gives no quantities for it, so work from a standard formula: 1 cup water, 1/2 cup butter, 1 cup flour, 4 eggs.
- The hinge: fat temperature"Heat well, but not to a boiling point" points to a moderate fat, not a smoking one; the recipe gives no figure, so judge by eye and keep it gentle. Fried choux must puff and dry slowly from the inside; too hot and the shells brown before the centres set, then collapse into raw paste when you cut them open.
- Fifteen minutes is not a misprintUnlike most fritters, these genuinely want a long, slow fry, and the recipe's fifteen minutes should be taken at face value. They swell considerably as they cook, and the recipe expects you to turn them with the skimmer from time to time.
- A gillHalf a cup. One and a half gills of cream is 3/4 cup, which whips up to roughly 1 1/2 cups.
- A quart of lardFour cups, enough depth for the puffs to float and be turned freely. Any neutral fat with a high smoke point works; lard was a common frying medium of the period.
- Walnut-like bitsAbout a rounded teaspoon each, no larger. Oversized portions stay wet in the middle at this frying temperature.
- The paper cornetA cone rolled from a piece of paper with the tip snipped off — a disposable piping bag. A small plain tip in a piping bag does the same job; the aperture cut with the knife is the filling hole.
- Sugar in the pasteOnly a tablespoon goes in. Sugar promotes browning, so a sweeter paste risks colouring before the shells are cooked through.
- Yield and timingThe recipe gives no yield. Fill shortly before serving; the shells soften once cream is inside, which is why the original fills at the last moment and sends them straight to table.
Fried choux paste — beignets soufflés — is still sold in its plain version under the folk name pets de nonne, a joke about convent kitchens. Filippini's International Cook Book (1906) collects dishes from the Delmonico's kitchens in New York, where he had been a chef, and it is a working document rather than a teaching one: hence the opening instruction to "prepare a pâte-à-choux" with no formula attached, on the assumption that anyone using the book had one by heart. The paper cornet is the same assumption at work.