Cream puffs & eclairs Choux a la creme, profiteroles and cream puffs are said to have originated in Renaissance France and Italy. Choux paste is different from other types of pastry because when cooked, it rises and the finished product has a hollow center. As was the custom of the day, these holes were variously filled with sweet or savory fillings. Cream puffs, as we know them today, are usually filled with custard or French cremes. Chocolate (as a glaze or filling) was an 18th century addition. This is the legend: Choux pastry is said to have been invented in 1540 by Popelini, Catherine de Medicis chef, but the pastrycooks art only truly began to develop in the 17th century and greatest innovator at the beginning of the 19th century was indubitably [Antonin] Careme... ---Larousse Gastronomique, Jenifer Harvey Lang, editor [Crown:New York] 1988 (p. 777-8) These are the facts: The real creation of choux paste is complex and cannot be established with any certainty, not least because its manufacture is a relatively simple process and it is possible that it was independently created in many places and at various times. In principle, choux paste requires only four ingredients: water, fat, flour and egg. The incorporation of an egg into what is effectively hot-water paste--and a fairly obvious innovation for an inquisitive cook--would produce a kind of choux paste. Tracing early cookery receipts is beset with difficulties, not least because authors heedlessly repeat foundation-myth andedotes. Elizabeth David, writing about the Florentine cooks that Catherine Medici was said to have brought with her to France in 1533, states, Those cooks...are part of a myth originating in mid-nineteenth-century France, perhaps in the imagination of of of the popular hsitorical novelists who flourished at that period, and certainly without existence in historical fact...Researchers are also faced with establishing the meaning of archaic terms and technical expressions. The nomenclature of of cookery is complicated not only by difficulties in establish early usage, but also by the lack of conformity of usage, not helped by the idiosyncrasies of early-modern spelling. A single cookery method or culinary product may be concealed under a whole variety of labels or (conversely and just a confusing) a single term may apply to one or more different methods or receipts. Such etymological considerations--a focal point for most investigations by cookery historians--bear upon choux...pastry...Historically, we find at least two pastries referred to as choux. It seems likely that the earliest use of the term in England was by was of imported translations of French seventeenth-century cookery books. In La Varennes The French Pastry Cook of 1656, the reader is told of The manner how to make a little Puff-paste Bunns, called in French Choux. But this paste is neither the puff-paste so beloved by French and English cooks from the sixteenth century or earlier--and known in France as pate feuilletee and in England as butter pasted and puff or puft paste--nor is it what today we would recognize as choux paste. The ingredients for La Varennes reciept includes a fist-size of fresh cheese...bruised with a little flour, two eggs, a further handful of flour or salt. When mixed, this is spread as thick as a finger, baked in two pieces and, once cooked, spread with butter, sugar and rosewater. The two pieces are sandwiched together and warmed in the oven, then decorated with sugar and preserved lemon. La Varenne also writes about this type of paste made into morsels the size of small eggs. So here the term choux seems to apply to both paste and to the small buns made from this paste. With a little imagination, a round cooked choux bun, or fritter, resembles the shape of a small cabbage. With this bun shape--choux being French for cabbage--we can see (literally) the reason for the name of the paste. These cheese-based pastes can be traced back to at least the thirteenth century where similar receipts for fritters appear in anonymous Andalusian cookbooks...Massailots ingredients for Benioles, or Petit Choux, are simliar to La Varennes...In England one of the several meanings of the words chou and puffs is amost identical to that of La Varennes and Massailots choux paste. Cotgrave, as early as 1611, describes petit chou as puffe-cake, or loafe, made of butter, cheese, fine meal, and yolks of egges. He tells us that there are two kinds, one round, and plumpe like an apple; the other also round, but much flatter...in 1706 petits choux crops up in Edward Phillips dictionary, New World of English Words, a sort of Paste for garninshing made of fat Cheese, Flower, Eggs, Salt, etc. baked in a Pye-pan, and Icd over with fine Sugar...there are several receipts found in early European cookbooks and manuscripts that broadly refer to what todays cooks call choux paste, or what we have referred to as twice-cooked pastry. The original French name was pate a chaud...Importantly, the second cooking of these pastries results in the formation of a pouch or pocket--ideal for filling with savoury of sweet mixture. In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England there were other words that sometimes (but by no means always) denoted a choux paste product, including benets...puffs and certain types of fritters...Certainly the idea of cooking a paste of flour, butter and liquid and then adding eggs to produce a small puffed pastry cake was known to some French cooks at the start of the seventeenth century...But choux paste, though by other names, can be found in even earlier books and manuscripts. Perhaps the earliest extant English receipt if found in A Book of Cookrye (1591) first published in 1584. The ingredients for Benets or Bennets( a kind of fritter) are practially identical to those fo John Eveylns French Fritters....The refined French name for these French Friters is Beignets Souffles...Eveyln tellus us that these fritters are of French origin, and this may well be so. However, we can find several receipts recognizable as choux paste in the German cook Sabina Welserins manuscript of 1553. They are more explicit than any contemporary French manuscripts and indicate long-standing familiarity with the technique. One hazards a guess that it originated independently of Queen Catherines Popelin, or that it derived from an earlier common source...Most of the earliest receipts for choux paste are for fritters...The term choux had not settled down [in the 18th century] to todays meaning...Today, the terms Cream Bun or Puff, profiterole and choux seems to have settled down; the ambiguity no longer an issue. ---Powches, Puffs and Profiteroles: Early Choux Paste Receipts, David Potter, Petits Propos Culinaires 73 [Prospect Books] 2003 (p. 25-40) Choux pastry is a thick batter made from flour, milk, butter, and eggs. Its most typical application is in the making of small round buns (as used for profiteroles) known in French as choux, literally cabbages, from their shape--hence pate a choux, the pastry used for making them. The first reference to the term in English comes in the 1706 edition of Edward Phillipss New World of English Words: Petits Choux, a sort of paste for garnishing, made of fat Cheese, Flour, Eggs, Salt, etc., bakd in a Pye-pan, and Icd over with fine Sugar. But it was not really until the late nineteenth century that it achieved any sort of general currencey in English. ---An A-Z of Food and Drink, John Ayto [Oxford University Press:Oxford] 2002 (p. 75) From the sixteenth century onwards convents made biscuits and fritters to be sold in the aid of good works...Missionary nuns took their talents as pastrycooks to the French colonies. The nuns of Lima had a great reputation after the sixteenth century, and chocolate owes a great deal to the convents. The puff pastries called feuillantines were first made in the seventeenth century in a convent of that name...Sugar and chocolate had now arrived on the scene; from the time of Louis XIV onwards those delicacies became extremely popular...Gastronomy flourished in the nineteenth century...Fauvel, a chef working for the famous pastry cook Chiboust, invented the Genoese sponge and also had a hand in the creation of the gateau Saint-Honore, so called in honour of the patron saint of pastrycooks. It is garnished with choux pastry puffs, and choux pastry is also used in making eclairs and choux a la creme, and a kind of chocolate eclair known as the religieuse (nun), though no one knows why. ---History of Food, Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat [Barnes & Noble:New York] 1992 (pages 243-244) Profiteroles are small round choux-pastry buns with a filling. This can be either savoury or sweet, but by far the commonest manifestation of the profiterole is with a cream filling and a covering of chocolate sauce, and piled in large quanitities, in the more ambitious type of restaurant, into a sort of pyramid. The word originated in French as a diminutive form of profit, and so etymologically means small gains--and indeed it may to begin with have denoted a little something extra cooked long with the masters main dish as a part of the servants perks. ---An A-Z of Food and Drink, John Ayto [Oxford University Press:Oxford] 2002 (p. 269)
Posted on: Wed, 05 Mar 2014 15:07:48 +0000