Cream Puffs an Unlikely Treat, Or Are They?
a community cookbook recipe
An Unlikely Treat
When I think of typical treats that a grandma would likely make, my first thought doesn’t go to cream puffs. These are, after all, a pastry that takes a considerable amount of time to make. There’s the choux pastry - more on this a little later - shaping the pastry, baking the pastry, prepping the pastry for the filling, and then filling the pastry. Cookies just seemed a bit easier and a more likely candidate to me.
But, according to my dad and auntie, cream puffs were indeed a regular treat prepared by my grandma. When I looked quizzically at my auntie, she said, “we always had so much cream, it needed to be used.” My dad recalls milking the cows every morning, putting the milk in the separator, and then storing both the cream and the milk in the well-house, this being the coolest spot on the farm. A farm without refrigeration.
I have my grandma’s cream puff recipe in her handwriting. It’s safely preserved in the Favorite Recipes Ladies Sewing Circle Cookbook curated by the Ladies of Gustav Adolph Lutheran Church in Strathcona, Minnesota in 1944.
My copy is a replica of the original. My Auntie had a booklet created for all of us cousins. Along with the book is a typed noted explaining that, “this is the ONLY cookbook [she] remembers [grandma] having and using while [she] was growing up.” Each recipe that a family member contributed to this community cookbook is listed on an inserted addendum with a note of how they are related, whether or not the recipe was particularly good, or served at a special event.
On the cover is a name written in the hand of someone just learning his letters - Glenn. He was the 3rd born in the family. Charismatic, handsome, and my favorite uncle. The inside cover includes an inscription from my grandma’s mother. It reads, “Happy Birthday, To Florence, From Mother, 1945.” It also contains a recipe for Cooked Salad Dressing written in my grandma’s hand in pencil. Just the ingredients. No instructions.
The cream puff recipe is on the last page of the cookbook along with a recipe for Doughnuts - another recipe I didn’t expect in a daily cookbook - and Apple Crisp. Now Apple Crisp makes sense to me.
The Table of Contents, which is in the back of the book, begins with Page 1 Prayer, followed by sections including Kitchen Weights, Measures and Temperatures, Frosting, Cookies, Pies, etc. What I think is most telling in the Table of Contents is that right after two pages of prayer and a weights and measures page, is the Scandinavian and other National Delicacies section. It’s clear that it was very important to these ladies to preserve the recipes of their culture. The recipes are very familiar to me, lefse, julekake, fattigmand, and yes lutefisk. Three stand out as not particularly Scandinavian, German Sweet Pickles, and two recipes for Kolackes, but would certainly fall into a National Delicacy of another group of Lutherans, those from Germany.
An Amateur Historian’s Take On Cream Puffs
If there’s one thing that you should know about me, it is that I am obsessed with history. Especially food history. For me food is a form of communication. And in order to communicate effectively, I think that you need to understand the origins, relations, and impacts of the form.
As with all stories, there are truths and lore, myths and facts. Oftentimes impossible to separate. All can add richness, depth, and even credence to the conversation. The conversation of Cream Puffs begins with a legend. It goes something like this.
In the year of our lord, 1540, Catherine de Medici - of the renowned Italian Renaissance family - and Queen of France, wife to Henry II had a particularly talented pastry chef. All of this is true. According to the myth, Catherine’s refined taste in art also bubbled over into the kitchen. In this myth, I imagine that Catherine was inspired to create a delicate pastry whose filling was as light as the pastry itself. With their heads close together, she and her pastry chef, Panterelli, conspired to create a pastry that would bring refinement to the French dining scene, something that she was quite abhorred by. Alas, most of this is a myth. Though Panterelli was a talented chef employed by the Queen and she was abhorred by the French dining etiquette and foods, cream puffs can actually be traced back to the Middle Ages.
During the 13th century, puffed pastries were being made by baking pastry dough in hot ovens until the pastry puffed. It would be sliced open and stuffed with a mixture of cheeses. To be fair, pastry chefs during Catherine’s reign were also experimenting with doughs that included flour, water, fat, and egg. This dough was known as choux pastry. Crossing the channel to England, recipes for butter pasted puffs were being shared from cook to cook by the early 1500’s. The dough was essentially the same as the choux pastry, flour, water, fat, and egg. The method was a bit different but the resulting layered pastry basted in a mixture of rosewater and sugar delighted the rich and famous of the day.
It’s fairly easy to understand how pinpointing the exact origin of a recipe or dish is quite difficult if not impossible. It is easy, however, to see how recipes and dishes evolve. Time, cooks, experimentation, availability of ingredients, and tastes all have had a hand in the evolution of the puff pastry. By the 17th century there was an agreement made, by whom, we’ll never know, that the pastry recipe that includes flour, water, fat, and egg would forever be called choux pastry. Why choux? Because the cooked puffs resemble a head of cabbage. The translation of the French word choux is cabbage.
Now, choux pastry can take many shapes, swans and pyramids are among the most popular. Even the names of the finished pastry vary. Puff pastries known as cream puffs are also called profiteroles. There are elongated puff pastries called eclairs. They can be filled with custards, sweet whipped cream, or ice cream and topped with chocolate.
Here in the States, the first recorded mention of this European delicacy was from the menu of the Revere House Restaurant in Boston in 1851.
From Royal Courts to a Rural Farm
I have to wonder if my grandma was doing more than being a frugal cook. Using ingredients that were readily available to her. Maybe she was making cream puffs as a form of escapism from a hard-knock life filled with daily chores that went well into the night, sweeping floors that were unlikely to remain clean for much longer than half a day, washing clothes that needed to be mended again and again, and preparing meals that began by harvesting a chicken from the farmyard. Maybe it was a way to transport herself to the elegance of a dining room far from farm life. Her children the lucky recipients of an aspiration for nicer things and a simpler life. I can only wonder.
Florence’s Cream Puffs
Makes: 24 cream puffs | Prep Time: 10 minutes | Cook Time: 20 minutes
Ingredients
1 cup water
1/2 cup butter
1 cup flour
1/8 tsp salt
3 eggs
1 cup heavy whipping cream
2 tablespoons powdered sugar
Instructions
Heat your oven to 450˚F.
In a medium sauce pan, combine water and butter. Bring to a boil.
Add the flour and salt. Stir vigorously with a wooden spoon until the dough comes away from the side of the pan, about 1 - 2 minutes.
Remove the saucepan from the heat and allow the mixture to cool slightly, about 5 minutes. Add one egg at a time, beating with a wooden spoon until the egg is completely incorporated into the flour mixture. Repeat with the remaining eggs until all 3 eggs have been completely incorporated.
Drop the batter by the spoonful 1 1/2-inches apart on a parchment or silpat-lined baking sheet.
Bake for 20 minutes.
Remove from the oven and make a small slip in the bottom of each puff to allow steam to escape. This will help to dry the interior just a bit.
Place the puffs to a wire rack and allow to cool completely.
When ready to fill, beat the whipping cream and powdered sugar until medium peaks form. Spoon cream into a pastry bag with a star tip. If you don’t have a pastry bag, you can just use a spoon to fill the puffs.
Using a serrated knife, slice off the top quarter of each of the puffs.
Fill the bottom portion of the puffs with whipped cream and replace the top.
You can drizzle with your favorite chocolate sauce or just serve them plain like my grandma did.
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Oh yes, the research rabbit hole...and thanks for the history of choux.