Cream Puffs
Sufficient for one large layer cake. 1 cupful water 1 cupful flour 5 tablespoonfuls Crisco 4 eggs 1/4 teaspoonful salt Put Crisco into small saucepan add water, bring to boiling point, add quickly flour and salt, stir well with wooden spoon until mixture leaves sides of pan, remove pan from fire, allow mixture to become cool, but not cold, add eggs, one at a time, and beat each one thoroughly in. Set in cool place one hour. Put mixture into forcing bag with tube and force it on to a tin greased with Crisco into small rounds; bake in hot oven forty minutes. When cold split them open on one side and fill with whipped cream sweetened and flavored to taste.
To make eclairs with this mixture press it on to tins in strips three and a half inches long, and a little distance apart. Brush over tops with beaten egg and bake in moderate oven thirty minutes. Cut open one side then fill and dip top into chocolate icing.
Sufficient for fifteen cream puffs. 1 cupful flour ½ cupful Crisco
This is standard pâte à choux with Crisco standing in for butter, printed in the 1910s promotional cookbook that introduced hydrogenated shortening to American kitchens. The method is sound; the oven directions and the stray lines of type need interpreting.
- The hinge: dry the paste, then cool itStir over heat until the dough pulls cleanly from the sides of the pan and films the bottom — that drives off water and lets the paste absorb the eggs. Let it cool until warm to the touch before adding eggs, or the first egg scrambles and the puffs will not rise.
- "Hot oven" and "moderate oven"Hot is usually read as 425–450°F, moderate as about 350°F. Forty minutes at 425°F straight through risks over-browning small puffs; modern practice is to start hot to force the steam rise, then drop to about 350°F once they are set and puffed, and bake until deep gold and dry-sounding.
- Do not open the oven earlyThe recipe does not say it, but a puff opened to the air before its walls are set will collapse. Leave the door shut for at least the first two-thirds of the bake, and pierce each puff to vent steam as soon as they come out.
- Crisco quantityFive tablespoonfuls is about 2 1/2 oz or 70 g. Butter substitutes one for one here and gives better flavour; the original specifies Crisco because the book exists to sell it.
- The stray last line"1 cupful flour 1/2 cupful Crisco" at the end belongs to no step in this recipe — it is a fragment of type, most likely a pastry proportion that migrated from a neighbouring entry. Ignore it.
- "Sufficient for one large layer cake"Another artifact of the setting; choux paste makes no layer cake. Trust the second yield line: fifteen cream puffs.
- Forcing bagA piping bag with a plain round tip, about 1/2 inch. A spoon works for puffs if the mounds are smoothed with a wet finger, but éclairs need the bag to keep an even thickness.
- Filling and holdingWhipped cream fillings need refrigeration and are best within a few hours; the shells go leathery once filled. Bake ahead, cool completely, and fill just before serving.
Choux paste — cooked flour and water enriched with eggs, raised by nothing but its own steam — is generally traced to sixteenth-century Italian and French court cookery and was codified in French pastry kitchens in the nineteenth century, where the éclair took its modern glazed form. What makes this version worth noting is not the pastry but the fat: The Story of Crisco was published by Procter & Gamble in 1913 to teach cooks what to do with hydrogenated cottonseed oil, a product with no culinary tradition behind it. The book worked by taking dishes every reader already knew and quietly rewriting the shortening line, so a classic French pastry appears here chiefly as proof that the new fat could do what butter and lard did. It is advertising in the shape of a recipe book, and one of the more effective examples of the form.