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Nun's Sighs
I oz. (2 tablespoonfuls) butter 1/2 pint (I cup) water 4 ozs. (1 cup) flour tract 1 teaspoonful vanilla ex- 4 eggs Sifted sugar Pinch of salt Fat for frying 1 tablespoonful sugar Put the butter into a saucepan, add the water, bring to boiling point, add quickly the flour, salt and sugar, stir well over the fire with a wooden spoon until the mixture leaves the sides of the pan, remove from the fire, allow to cool, but not become cold and add the extract and the eggs, beating each one in thoroughly. Put into a forcing bag with a star tube, force into smoking hot fat and fry to a golden brown color. Drain and serve dusted over with sifted sugar. 4 eggs
This is a choux paste — the same dough as éclairs — piped straight into hot fat instead of baked. The proportions are sound; the technique needs a little translating.
- The measures1 oz butter is 2 tablespoons; 1/2 pint here is the American cup (8 fl oz), and 4 oz flour is about 1 cup of soft plain flour. Weigh the flour if you can: 115 g gives a more reliable paste than a scooped cup.
- Dry out the pasteThe hinge of the whole recipe is stirring over the heat until the dough pulls cleanly from the sides of the pan and films the base. Underdried paste absorbs fat and collapses; give it a full minute or two of vigorous beating after it comes together.
- Cooling before the eggs"Cool but not cold" means warm to the finger rather than steaming; the usual guidance is to let it drop to somewhere around 60C/140F. Much hotter and you risk scrambling the eggs.
- Egg by eggFour eggs to 4 oz of flour is a rich but conventional choux proportion. Beat each in completely before the next, and hold the last one back if the paste already falls from the spoon in a thick, glossy ribbon; modern eggs may run larger than those intended here.
- Frying temperature"Smoking hot" is not what you want with a modern neutral oil. Hold the fat at 175–180C (350–355F). Hotter and the outsides brown before the interiors puff and set hollow; cooler and they soak.
- Piping into fatPipe short lengths from a star tube and cut them free with scissors dipped in the fat. Fry only a few at a time — they swell considerably and need room to turn. Six to eight minutes, turning, until deep gold and light in the hand.
- Serving and yieldPiped small, the batch will make a few dozen fritters. Dust with confectioners' sugar and eat within the hour; choux fritters go leathery once cold and do not reheat well.
The name echoes the French soupirs de nonne, one of a whole family of convent sweets — nuns' sighs, nuns' bellies, angel's hair — that came out of enclosed religious houses in southern Europe, where convents were often the local source of fine confectionery and sold sweets to support themselves. The dough itself is ordinary choux paste, generally traced to sixteenth-century Italian court cooking and formalised in France, and here it is fried rather than baked. A book called The Something Different Dish is exactly where such a recipe belonged in the early twentieth century: a familiar pastry technique given a foreign name, offered to American hostesses looking for a dessert their guests had not met before.