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Frosting for Eclairs
One tablespoon corn starch, one cup milk, one egg, one cup of sugar, one-half cup of grated chocolate; boil all together until thick, and frost.
This is a cooked cornstarch-and-chocolate icing — closer to a thick pastry cream than to a modern buttercream — and it stiffens considerably as it cools. A few points make the difference between glossy and grainy.
- The hinge: temper the eggWhisk the egg with the cornstarch and a little of the cold milk before anything goes over heat. "Boil all together" at least implies starting with everything cold, but an egg heated hard with sugar and chocolate can still curdle into sweet scrambled egg, and the recipe gives no warning about it.
- Grated chocolateIn a book of this period this means unsweetened or bittersweet block chocolate, grated because it would not otherwise melt evenly. Half a cup grated is roughly 2 oz by weight. Modern chocolate chips resist melting by design; use a chopped bar.
- The sugar is high by modern tasteA full cup of sugar against 2 oz of unsweetened chocolate and one cup of milk gives a very sweet, almost fudge-like set. Three-quarters of a cup is closer to current expectations and will still thicken properly, since the cornstarch, not the sugar, does the setting.
- How far to cook itCornstarch needs to reach a full bubble to lose its raw starchy taste and to reach maximum thickness, but keep it at a bare boil and stir constantly. A minute or two of visible bubbling is enough; longer over high heat can thin the mixture again as the starch breaks down.
- "And frost"Apply while still warm and pourable — it spreads like thick custard and skins over quickly. Once cold it is spoonable rather than spreadable. It is also, in practice, perfectly good as the filling inside the eclairs as well as the coating on top.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; the ingredients make something in the region of a pint of thick icing, enough to coat a batch of eclairs, or to fill and top rather fewer.
- StorageBecause it is milk- and egg-based, it is a custard and belongs in the refrigerator. Treat filled eclairs as a same-day item and keep them chilled.
Eclairs reached American cookbooks in the second half of the nineteenth century, arriving with the general vogue for French pastry that followed the choux-paste "cream cakes" and "cream puffs" already familiar in domestic manuals; the name is French for lightning, generally explained as a reference to how quickly they are eaten. What is telling here is the frosting itself: rather than the confectioners'-sugar glaze or the poured fondant a French patissier would have used, this is a boiled cornstarch custard, thickened with the cheap, reliable starch that had become a household staple in the United States after mid-century. Grated chocolate rather than melted couverture points the same way — chocolate was sold as a hard, unsweetened cake to be grated for cooking, and the cook's sugar bowl supplied the sweetness. The result is a recipe that produces something recognisably eclair-shaped by way of the American pantry.