Home › Pudding Recipes › Siamese Twins
Siamese Twins
2 ozs. (4 tablespoonfuls) butter 1 teaspoonful sugar 4 eggs 1/2 pint (I cup) water Fruit glacé ½ pint (1 cup) flour Stars of whipped and 1/4 teaspoonful salt sweetened cream Siamese Twins is the name of double cream puffs.
Put the butter into a small saucepan; add the water and bring it to the boiling point; add the flour sifted with the salt and sugar; stir well with a wooden spoon until the mixture leaves the sides of the pan, remove from the fire, and allow to cool but not become cold; add the eggs, beating each one in thoroughly. Set away in a cool place for one hour. Put into a forcing bag with a tube; force it out into two rounds each about the size of a large walnut, join the two together, brush over with beaten egg, and bake in a moderate oven for thirty minutes. Set aside until cold, then glaze over with the fruit glacé; when this is set, decorate each puff with a star of whipped and sweetened cream.
To make the fruit glacé, put three-fourths of a pound of confectioners' sugar into a pan; add two tablespoonfuls of fruit syrup, one tablespoonful of warm water and a few drops of red color; mix together, just warm over the fire and use at once.
This is a standard choux paste piped as two joined rounds, glazed and topped with cream. The typography of the original ingredient column has suffered: the capital I's are 1's, and the "1½ pint (1 cup) flour" should read ½ pint (1 cup), matching the water.
- The hinge: dry the paste, then load the eggsStir the flour into the boiling liquid over heat until the paste balls up and films the pan bottom — that step drives off water and is what lets the puffs rise hollow. Cool to warm before adding eggs one at a time, or they scramble.
- Oven temperatureA "moderate oven" in this period is usually reckoned at about 350-375F, and thirty minutes at that heat may leave the puffs pale and damp. Current practice is 425F for the first 12-15 minutes to force the steam and set the shell, then down to 350F to dry out, roughly 30-35 minutes in total. Do not open the door during the first two-thirds.
- Measures2 ozs. butter is 4 tablespoons or half a stick. A cup of flour here is about 4½ oz by weight. Note this is a lean paste — modern choux usually carries twice the butter, so expect a crisper, less rich shell.
- Resting the pasteThe hour in a cool place is not essential; it simply firms the paste for cleaner piping. If you pipe warm paste it will spread, and the two rounds will merge into a blob rather than a joined pair.
- Piping the twinsA plain half-inch tube, two mounds the size of a large walnut set just touching so they fuse as they expand. Pipe well apart on the sheet — they roughly triple. Brush the egg wash on with a light hand and do not let it run down onto the pan, which glues the base and stops the lift.
- Fruit glacéThree-quarters of a pound of confectioners' sugar to three tablespoons of liquid is a stiff water icing; warm it only to blood heat, since overheating dulls the gloss and it sets in the pan. "Fruit syrup" here means the syrup from preserved or bottled fruit — raspberry or currant would suit — with the drops of red colour doing the actual tinting, as the recipe directs.
- FillingAs written the puffs are glazed and crowned with a rosette of cream, not filled. They are better split or pierced and filled with sweetened whipped cream or pastry cream, and they should be filled within a few hours of serving or the shells soften.
- YieldThe original gives none. This quantity of paste makes about 12 to 14 double puffs.
The name is period slang rather than culinary description: Chang and Eng Bunker, conjoined brothers born in Siam in 1811, reached America in 1829 and Britain in 1830, and lived in North Carolina until their deaths in 1874, and their fame attached the phrase "Siamese twins" to any joined pair in English usage. Pastry cooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries applied it to two choux buns baked fused together. The paste is the ordinary pâte à choux, generally traced to sixteenth-century Italian and French court cookery and standardised by Carême's generation, and by the time of a book like this one it was a workhorse: the same batter gave éclairs, profiteroles, croquembouche and these novelties.