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Pain De La Mecque
Prepare a pate-a-choux, have a very clean pastry sheet ready. With a tablespoon take up as much as spoon can hold, lightly smooth surface with blade of a buttered knife, then with another tablespoon dipped in melted butter scoop out paste from the other spoon, drop it in the pan, and continue in same manner until paste is all in. dredge a little powdered sugar over, set in oven for twenty-five minutes, remove, let rest for five minutes, then split open the cakes without detaching them. Beat up one and a half gills thick cream to a stiff froth, add one ounce powdered sugar, half teaspoon vanilla essence, and beat for a minute more. Drop the whipped cream in a pastry bag with a tube at the bottom and fill up the inside of the cakes with it, dress on a dish with a folded napkin, sprinkle a little powdered sugar over and serve.
A cream-filled choux bun under another name, with the two-spoon shaping method that predates the widespread home use of a piping bag for the paste itself. The recipe assumes you already have a pâte à choux formula to hand and gives no oven temperature, so both need filling in.
- The pasteNo choux recipe is given here. A standard working ratio is 1 cup water, 1/2 cup butter, 1 cup flour and 4 eggs, the flour beaten in off the heat and the eggs added one at a time until the paste falls from the spoon in a thick, glossy sheet.
- Oven heatThe original names none. Choux needs an initial blast to raise it — 425F for the first 10 to 12 minutes — then 350F for the remainder of the 25 minutes to dry the shells through. Opening the door early collapses them.
- Two-spoon shapingThe paste is shaped with spoons rather than piped, though the same recipe uses a bag and tube for the cream: a heaped tablespoon of paste, the top smoothed with a buttered blade, then pushed off with a second tablespoon dipped in melted butter. Buttering that second spoon is what stops the paste clinging. The recipe gives no yield.
- "Pastry sheet"A flat baking sheet, lightly buttered or lined with parchment. Space the mounds well apart; they roughly double.
- GillsIn American usage a gill is half a cup, so one and a half gills of cream is 3/4 cup; an imperial gill of 5 fl oz would make it nearer a full cup. An ounce of powdered sugar is roughly 1/4 cup. The recipe states no yield, so judge whether the cream stretches against however many buns the paste gives you.
- Let them rest splitThe five-minute rest and the splitting are not decorative. Cutting the shells open lets trapped steam escape so the interiors stay crisp rather than turning damp under the cream.
- Fill coldShells must be fully cool before the cream goes in, or it melts and weeps. Fill within an hour or two of serving; choux softens fast once wet.
- Serving'Dress on a dish with a folded napkin' is period plating; the folded linen is usually explained as keeping the buns from sliding, and a doily or plain plate does the same job.
The name means "bread of Mecca." In French usage pain (or pain à la) Mecque generally refers to a choux bun baked with coarse pearl sugar on top and eaten plain; the version here, split and filled with sweetened whipped cream, is essentially a cream puff, and the connection to Mecca looks decorative rather than culinary. The paste is shaped with spoons while the bag and tube are kept for the cream.