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Cream Puff Balls
1 cupful flour 1/2 cupful Crisco 1/2 cupful water 4 eggs ½ teaspoonful salt Put Crisco and water into small saucepan, bring to boil, add quickly flour and salt, stir well with wooden spoon until mixture leaves sides of pan, remove from fire, allow to cool, but not become cold, add eggs, beating each one thoroughly in. Turn mixture on to well Criscoed plate and divide into small puffs or cakes. Put on Criscoed tins and bake a golden brown in hot oven, thirty minutes. These puffs may be filled with preserves, custard, or savory mixtures. Sufficient for thirty puffs. 1½ cupfuls Crisco 2 cupfuls sugar 4 cupfuls flour 6 eggs
This is standard choux paste (pâte à choux) made with shortening instead of butter, and the method is sound. A few of the figures and directions need translating.
- The quantities are incompleteOnly the water (1/2 cupful), salt, and four eggs are specified for the puffs. A workable choux paste uses roughly equal volumes of water and flour with about half that volume of fat, and 1/2 cupful of water will not carry four eggs — four eggs belong with about a cupful of liquid. Treat the numbers as unreliable and go by the texture described: paste that pulls away from the sides of the pan, then a dough that holds a soft peak after the eggs.
- Hot ovenRoughly 400-425F. Choux needs high heat at the start so the water in the paste turns to steam and inflates the shells before the crust sets. The book's thirty minutes suits fairly substantial puffs; the small ones this quantity yields will probably want less, and some bakers drop the heat for the last ten minutes to dry the interiors.
- Do not open the ovenThis is the hinge. The puffs rise on steam alone, and a draught of cool air part-way through collapses them permanently. Leave the door shut until they are a deep golden brown and firm to the touch.
- "Allow to cool, but not become cold"Let the cooked paste drop to about 140F before adding eggs — warm enough to work, cool enough that the eggs do not scramble. Beating each egg in completely before the next is what builds the structure.
- "Criscoed"Simply greased with shortening. Any neutral solid fat or a light film of oil works; parchment is easier still and needs no fat at all.
- ShapingTurning the paste out onto a greased plate and dividing it by hand gives rustic, uneven puffs. A piping bag or two spoons gives more even ones, which bake more predictably. Space them two inches apart.
- FillingSplit or pierce the shells while still warm to let steam escape, then cool completely before filling. Warm shells turn a custard or cream filling soupy and the crust soggy.
- YieldThirty small puffs as written, which suggests bite-size rather than dessert-size shells. Expect twelve to fifteen if you make them large enough to fill and serve as a plated sweet.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was Procter & Gamble's recipe book for a product that had only just appeared: hydrogenated cottonseed oil, sold as a shortening that would keep without refrigeration and would not carry the flavour of lard. The book's job was to prove Crisco could stand in anywhere fat was called for, which is why the word appears as a verb — "well Criscoed plate," "Criscoed tins." Choux paste was a shrewd choice to demonstrate that: it is a technical dough, associated with French pastry cooks, and its rise depends on steam rather than on any quality of the fat, so a shortening can plausibly stand in for butter. The paste's origins are the subject of a folk tradition tracing it to sixteenth-century Italian and French court kitchens, and it is usually said to have taken something like its modern form in French pastry kitchens from the late eighteenth century onward; by 1913 an American cookbook could assume its readers had met cream puffs and éclairs and wanted to make them at home.