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Apricot Eclair
Prepare some batter made as follows: Dissolve one ounce of butter in two ounces of water, add an ounce and a half of flour, and mix well together over the fire; remove it, and mix in, one after the other, three eggs, a pinch of salt, and three ounces of powdered white sugar. Have ready a buttered baking sheet. With a wooden spoon work up the batter into twelve rolls, each about four inches long and half an inch wide and deep. Cover them with pounded sugar, and shake it off; the paste will not leave the sheet. For the apricot pulp, peel, slice, and stew one dozen apricots with a quarter of a pound of white sugar. Rub through a hair sieve into a basin. Make a hole at one end of the eclair, and force in two table-spoonfuls of the apricot, and put a neat layer down the centre on the top of each eclair. Probable cost 2s. 6d.
This is choux paste under an older name, with an apricot purée standing in for the usual cream. The chief problem is that the book gives no oven at all, and the egg-to-flour ratio as printed is far outside modern practice.
- The missing ovenNo temperature or time is given, which was normal in a book assuming a coal range and a cook who could judge heat by hand. Choux wants a hot start and a drier finish: 400F for about 15 minutes, then 350F until the shells are firm and dry through, 10 to 15 minutes more. Do not open the door in the first ten minutes.
- The proportions are suspectAn ounce and a half of flour to three eggs is roughly double the egg a choux paste of this size would normally carry, and the batter will be very slack for working into rolls with a spoon. Either the flour or the egg count may be a printer's error; a stiffer paste would take rather more flour to the egg, with the last egg beaten in only if the paste still stands in a stiff ribbon.
- Weights, not volumesTwo ounces of water is 4 tablespoons, about 60 ml; the liquid is given by weight here, though the same recipe uses spoon measures for the filling. A dozen apricots comes to roughly 1 lb before stoning.
- The sugar in the pasteThree ounces of sugar to an ounce and a half of flour is a very sweet, soft dough that browns fast and can collapse. Modern choux takes a teaspoon or less. "Powdered white sugar" here means finely ground sugar, closer to caster than to today's confectioners' sugar, which contains cornstarch.
- Pounded sugar, shaken offThe coating is simply crushed sugar dusted over and tipped away, leaving a thin crust that crackles as the shells rise. Do it just before baking, or the sugar dissolves into the surface.
- Hair sieveA fine-mesh nylon or stainless sieve does the same work. Push the stewed fruit through with a ladle or plastic scraper; the purée should be thick enough to hold a line on top of the pastry, so reduce it further if it slumps.
- Fill only when coldTwo tablespoons of warm purée forced into a hot shell will steam it soft. Cool the shells on a rack, pierce one end, and fill through a plain nozzle.
- YieldTwelve small éclairs about four inches long, served the day they are made — sugared choux goes leathery overnight.
Éclair — French for lightning — belongs to the wave of Parisian pâtisserie that entered English kitchens in the second half of the nineteenth century, and the name is generally traced to the speed with which the things are eaten, though the shine of the glaze has also been suggested. Choux paste was taught as a technique in its own right: a flour-and-water panade cooked on the fire, then loosened with egg, which rises on its own steam without any raising agent. The apricot filling reflects a period when a fruit pulp rubbed through a sieve was a standard confectioner's preparation, kept ready for tarts, creams and ices alike; the priced note at the end, 2s. 6d., is the book's routine costing line, of a kind used for household budgeting.