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Profiterolles
(Paris.) Heat but do not boil 2 ounces butter, 1 ounce of sugar, and 1/2 pint of milk. Add 1 spoonful of orangeflower water and enough flour to make a paste. Beat in 3 eggs and bake in balls as large as a peach, in a slow oven. When high and crisp, let them cool, split them in half, and fill with a custard, whipped cream, or jam.
This is pâte à choux written in shorthand, and two of its instructions run against how choux is now understood to work. Read the temperature and mixing notes before starting.
- Bring the liquid to a boil"Heat but do not boil" will not gelatinise the starch properly. Standard practice is to bring the milk, butter and sugar to a full boil, add the flour all at once off the heat, then dry the paste over low heat for a minute or two until it films the bottom of the pan.
- The oven is the hingeA slow oven (conventionally reckoned at around 300F, though the book gives no figure) is unlikely to raise choux. The puffs need steam, which means a hot start: 425F for the first 15 minutes, then down to 350F for 20-25 more to dry the shells. Do not open the door during the first stage.
- How much flour"Enough to make a paste" is the vaguest line in the recipe. For a half pint of milk, reckon on 4 to 4 1/2 ounces (a scant cup) of plain flour; the paste should pull away from the pan sides in a single mass.
- Half a pintIt is not clear which pint is intended: an American half pint is 8 fluid ounces, a British one 10. If you use 10, scale up the flour and add a fourth egg to match.
- Beat the eggs in one at a timeThree eggs added together will slacken the paste faster than you can judge it. Add them singly, off the heat and after the paste has cooled a little, and stop when the mixture falls from the spoon in a thick ribbon that holds a soft peak.
- Orange-flower waterStill sold, still potent. In texts of this period a 'spoonful' may mean either a teaspoon or a tablespoon; start with a teaspoon, since a tablespoon can taste soapy. Buy the distilled kind rather than an extract in alcohol.
- Size and yieldBalls 'as large as a peach' are large by current standards, closer to a cream puff than a profiterole. This quantity gives roughly 8 to 12 large puffs, or about twice that number small.
- Split them while warmPierce them as they come out -- cutting the tops or piercing each shell as it leaves the oven lets the steam out and keeps the interior from going damp. Cool fully before filling, as the recipe directs, and fill no more than an hour or two ahead.
Profiteroles arrive here as a souvenir of Paris, the '(Paris.)' tag marking where the recipe was picked up. The word profiterole is usually said to predate the pastry -- reported as having meant a small gratuity or perquisite in sixteenth-century French, and by extension a little roll baked in the ashes and given away -- though this line of descent is traditional rather than firmly documented. Choux paste itself is generally traced, traditionally rather than on firm documentary evidence, to Italian cooks working in France in the sixteenth century, with the name pâte à choux coming from the cabbage-like look of the baked puffs. The orange-flower water is the period marker: distilled flower waters were a standard aromatic of French pastry well into the nineteenth century, only gradually displaced by vanilla as vanilla extract became cheap and reliable.