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Choux Pralines
Prepare a pate-a-choux. Slide a tube half an inch in diameter at the bottom of a pastry bag, then drop in the pate-a-choux and carefully press the paste down into a pastry sheet, in six equal cakes two inches high. Finely chop two ounces shelled almonds and sprinkle over the cakes. With the blade of a small knife very lightly press the almonds in the cake on the surface, set the pan in a moderate oven for twenty-five minutes, remove and let cool off for ten minutes. Then with the point of a knife make an incision at one side of each cake, fill each cavity with a vanilla whipped cream, sprinkle a little powdered sugar over, dress on a dish and serve.
A plain almond-topped choux bun, filled with whipped cream. The recipe assumes you already know the paste, so the useful detail here is in the baking and the filling.
- The hinge: bake them dryChoux must be fully dried out or they collapse as they cool. Twenty-five minutes at 350F is the minimum for buns this size; bake until deep golden and firm to a tap, then leave them in the turned-off oven a few minutes with the door ajar rather than pulling them at the first sign of colour.
- "A moderate oven"350F. Some cooks start choux at 400-425F for the first ten minutes to force the steam, then drop to 350F for the remainder; the older single-temperature approach works if the oven is well preheated and not opened during the first fifteen minutes.
- Pâte à chouxNot given on this page. A standard proportion is 1 cup water, 1/2 cup butter, 1 cup flour and 4 eggs, which yields well more than six two-inch buns — a dozen or more — so scale down or pipe extras.
- "Pastry sheet"An ungreased or lightly greased flat baking sheet. Parchment is easier and gives a cleaner release; do not flour the sheet heavily, as the piped mounds need to grip slightly to rise straight.
- Making the almonds stickThe knife-blade pressing works better if the piped mounds are first brushed with beaten egg. Dry chopped almonds on bare paste tend to fall off during the rise.
- Powdered sugarConfectioners' sugar. Period "powdered sugar" was a finely ground granulated sugar without cornstarch, but modern confectioners' sugar is the intended effect here.
- Vanilla whipped creamHeavy cream whipped with a little sugar and vanilla extract. Fill through the side slit no more than an hour before serving, or the shells soften.
- YieldSix cakes, as written; the recipe does not state how many it serves. Two inches high is a substantial bun, and piping them smaller would give a few more.
This comes from Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book (1906), a compendium built by a New York hotel and restaurant chef who worked in the Delmonico's orbit, and the choux section reads exactly like the professional French pastry work such kitchens turned out daily. The name presumably marks the almonds: praline in French pastry refers to nuts caramelized or worked with sugar, though extending it to anything merely almond-crusted is looser usage; the word is traditionally traced to the 17th-century French marshal du Plessis-Praslin, whose cook is said to have popularized sugared almonds. Pâte à choux itself long predates the name — it is usually traced back to the hot-paste doughs of Renaissance Italian and French court cooks, though that lineage is more tradition than documented record — and by the late 19th century it was the foundation of an entire family of hotel desserts: éclairs, profiteroles, gâteau St-Honoré and buns like these. That Filippini gives no recipe for the paste here suggests who he expected to be reading: a cook who already had it by heart.