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Pate-A-Choux
Place in a saucepan one gill cold milk, one gill cold water, two ounces butter and one saltspoon salt. Place the pan on the range, lightly mix, and as soon as it comes to a boil immediately add one-quarter pound sifted flour and sharply stir with the spatula for two minutes; then stand the pan on a table, break in one egg, sharply stir for one minute, break in another egg, stir again for one minute; repeat the same with three more eggs and pate-a-choux is ready to use.
A standard choux paste, given in weights and old liquid measures. The proportions are sound; the only thing the text leaves out is how much cooling the paste needs before the eggs go in.
- GillsA gill is half a cup, 4 fl oz or about 120 ml. So the liquid is 1 cup total, half milk and half water.
- Flour by weightA quarter pound is 115 g, roughly 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons of all-purpose flour. Weigh it if you can — choux is unforgiving of a heavy-handed cup.
- SaltspoonA quarter teaspoon. Two ounces of butter is half a stick, 55 g.
- The hinge: let it cool"Stand the pan on a table" is doing real work. Beating the flour paste over heat for two minutes dries it out; if the first egg goes in while the paste is above roughly 160F it will scramble. Give it four or five minutes off the heat, or spread it in a bowl, before starting the eggs.
- Five eggs is a ceiling, not a ruleThe recipe adds five one at a time, which is the right method, though eggs of the period may well have run smaller than modern large ones. Stop when the paste falls from the spatula in a thick ribbon and a furrow drawn through it closes slowly — that may be after four.
- BakingNo oven is given because this is a base preparation; any temperature here is modern practice, not the book's. For cream puffs or éclairs, a hot start around 425F to force the steam, then down to about 350F to dry the shells through. Do not open the door early.
- YieldAbout 600 g of paste — roughly 20 to 24 cream puffs, or correspondingly fewer éclairs depending on the length piped.
Pâte à choux is often said to mean "cabbage paste," from the small knobbly buns the baked paste forms, which were thought to resemble cabbages. The technique — cooking flour into boiling liquid, then beating in eggs to make a batter that rises on its own steam — is generally traced to sixteenth-century Italian and French court kitchens, and it was standardised into the form given here by nineteenth-century French professional pastry work, where it underpins éclairs, profiteroles, gougères and beignets alike.