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Cheese Puffs
Take a saucepan, put in one cupful of boiling water, two tablespoonfuls of butter, one-quarter of a teaspoonful of salt and a dash of pepper (white or cayenne). When boiling, throw in quickly one and one-quarter cupfuls of flour and stir until the mixture leaves the sides of the pan. Take from the fire, cover closely and set aside until nearly cold. Then beat in, one at a time, three large eggs, using only part of the egg at first; the batter will be just right when a spoonful dropped on a pan will hold its shape without spreading. Stir in one-half of a cupful of grated cheese and set aside for half an hour. Drop by teaspoonfuls on buttered pans, sprinkle each with grated cheese and bake in a moderate oven for about half an hour. To test, take one from pan, if it feels light, it is done.
This is pâte à choux with cheese beaten in — what a French kitchen would call gougères. The method is sound; only a few points need translating.
- Oven temperature"A moderate oven" is around 350-375F. Modern choux practice often starts hotter, 400-425F for the first 10-12 minutes for maximum lift, then drops to 350F to dry the interiors. Half an hour total suits teaspoon-sized puffs.
- The hinge: dry the pasteStir the flour over heat until the paste pulls cleanly from the sides and leaves a film on the pan bottom. Underdried paste holds too much water, and the puffs collapse as they cool.
- Cool before the eggs"Nearly cold" is more caution than needed; lukewarm, around 140F, is enough. Hot paste scrambles the egg. Covering the pan, as the original directs, keeps the surface from drying or forming a skin.
- Egg by feel, not by countThe instruction to add only part of each egg at first is the important one. Three large eggs is a guide; stop when a spoonful holds a soft peak and does not spread. Flour absorbency varies more than the recipe admits.
- The cheeseA firm dry grating cheese works best — Gruyère, aged Cheddar, Parmesan. Half a cup grated is roughly 2 oz. Very fatty or moist cheese weighs the batter down and slackens it.
- The half-hour restOptional by modern practice. It lets the paste firm slightly so the spoonfuls hold shape, but the batter can go straight onto the sheets if it is stiff enough.
- PansButtered pans still work; parchment is easier and gives a cleaner release. Space the puffs about 1½ inches apart.
- Testing and cooling"Feels light" means the puff is hollow and dry inside. Do not open the oven during the first 15 minutes. Pierce each with a skewer on removal to let steam escape, or they soften.
- YieldRoughly three to four dozen small puffs, depending on how generously they are dropped. Best within a few hours; they can be recrisped at 325F for five minutes.
Choux paste — flour cooked into boiling water and butter, then loosened with egg — is a French technique generally traced to Italian and French court cooks of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and by the nineteenth it was a standard of the professional pastry kitchen for éclairs, profiteroles and beignets. The savoury cheese version is associated particularly with Burgundy, where gougères were served with wine, though American books of this period rarely used the French name. Its appearance in a general household cookbook is a reminder that the puffs could be made from pantry staples with no mould, no ramekins and no chafing dish.